Luke-Thomas Henderson: Kaimana @ Incline Gallery

Incline Gallery is pleased to present Kaimana, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Luke-Thomas Henderson

With works made both in Hawaiʻi and San Francisco, the exhibition moves through ideas of extinction, memory, interdependence, and responsibility, asking what it means to carry people, place, and knowledge forward across time and distance.

“I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope” The future is in the past.

Luke-Thomas Tokimasa Henderson is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised on the east side of Oʻahu. Guided by his Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Okinawan, and European heritage, his work emerges from traditional craft practices rooted in land stewardship and ecological relationality, using them as living frameworks for contemporary innovation.

He approaches making as both research and inheritance, integrating traditional craft processes in ways that expand them beyond traditional application. He believes the evolution of craft is an act of radical resistance that projects Indigenous values into the future. For him, craft is not a fixed practice but a living framework, sustained through use, experimentation, and adaptation by each new generation of practitioners.

With a background in material and environmental science, his work brings together scientific and ancestral lineages of knowledge, both grounded in close observation, testing, repetition, and care. By treating science and craft as parallel systems of inquiry rather than opposites, he works through hybrid processes that merge traditional practices with self-developed techniques, materials, and methodologies.

His recent work focuses on integrating once-separate mediums into interdisciplinary forms, searching for a visual language that reflects his own voice while remaining accountable to lineage and place. Through this merging of tradition and innovation, he seeks to expand what Native Hawaiian art and craft can look like today, honoring inherited knowledge by allowing it to grow, adapt, and thrive.