Arrival Art Fair 2025
June 12-15
Checked Baggage
Curated by Jon Santos / Ontopo
Arrival Art Fair, North Adams, MA – 2025
What does it mean to bring something back from Hawai‘i?
I returned from the islands with checked baggage, literally and otherwise. Inside: artworks made in or about Hawai‘i. But also: questions about tourism, extraction, and the unequal freedoms of movement. In this presentation, the work of artists Nalani Sato, Kainoa Gruspe, Dane Nakama, Nicole Parente-Lopez, Juvana Soliven, Pier Fichefeux, and Roland Longstreet travels far from its place of making. Crossing oceans, borders, and narratives—to arrive here, in a former mill town turned cultural destination.
This is not a show about Hawai‘i. It is a show moved by it.
Tourism, particularly in Hawai‘i, is not just a vacation. It is a system of occupation, one that builds fantasy atop displacement. Tourists often arrive in Hawai‘i with empty hands and open cameras. These artists arrive with full hands, full hearts, and full context. Their practices: some sculptural, some metaphoric, some celestial—carry the weight of place, but not the claim of ownership.
In Hawai‘i, visitors are taught (when they’re paying attention) that arrival carries responsibility. That to be on the land means to give something back to it. That if you take a photo, a hike, a memory—you owe a gesture in return.
The title, Checked Baggage, points to both the literal and symbolic cargo we carry when we cross borders. It suggests the weight of context. Of memory. Of implication. It hints at surveillance, classification, loss. And it asks: What’s hidden in the luggage we drag into new places? What stories are stitched into the seams of what we display?
To show this work here is to place it in a new ecology—not neutral, but charged. North Adams, like Hawai‘i, is a place reshaped by those who “arrive.” The artists in this show don’t just arrive—they respond.
