Celebrated local ceramicist David Kuraoka is helping to renovate the former Kress Store building on Rice Street, where a community art center is in the offing.
When complete, the center will include an event and performance venue, a printmaking space and a ceramics studio.
The studio will be stocked with kilns and pottery wheels selected by Kuraoka, who is supervising its development at the request of building owner Mark Gabbay, global CEO of real-estate-investment company LaSalle Investment Management.
It will be the island’s first public-ceramics workshop, according to Kuraoka.
“I hope that by having this, future generations can be exposed to ceramics,” he said in a recent interview at his Ha‘ena home studio.
For the aspiring artist, ceramics and printmaking have greater barriers to entry than other mediums, he said.
“Painters can paint in the garage. A drawer can draw. But ceramic and printmaking requires equipment,” Kuraoka explained. “We’re trying to set up the equipment so that it makes it possible for people to do it.”
The studio will take up 2,000 of the building’s 22,000 square feet, and include a storage room, wheeled work tables and a variety of electric and gas-fueled kilns capable of reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Finer points regarding the studio’s use have yet to be established. But demonstrations and lectures given by visiting artists are likely part of the equation, according to Kuraoka, who remembers childhood visits to the Kress Store in its heyday.
“It was an important store when I was a kid. All the ladies dressed up in 1940s clothes, 1950s dresses,” he recalled. “Santa Claus would come (at Christmastime).”
Kaua‘i artists Bruna Stude and Carol Yotsuda will operate the forthcoming art center’s printmaking and event and performance spaces, respectively.
The building is slated to open, tentatively, at the end of this year.
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Scott Yunker, reporter, can be reached at 245-0437 or syunker@thegardenisland.com.
