Juvana Soliven

Juvana Soliven is a visual artist and educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. Soliven’s work subverts and utilizes object languages to speak to issues regarding intimacy, labor, grief, bodily autonomy, human rights, and women’s positionality within the patriarchal system — many works resulting in amalgamate forms of the censored body, medical implement, weapon, adornment, and trap. The pixelated censor is used broadly in her work and is interrogated through the tedium of craft practices — beading, weaving, paper crafts, metalsmithing, enameling, sewing — as a meditation on labor and the endless work needed to fight for what is ours.

Soliven holds an MFA in Metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art (2016), a BFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa (2013), and studied Art Restoration and Conservation at Lorenzo de’ Medici International School in Florence, Italy (2012). Soliven is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Her work is in the collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, as well as in private collections. Soliven has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Finland, and Argentina.