Lawrence Seward

Lawrence Seward (b. 1966, Honolulu) has been making and exhibiting art professionally since 1990. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, video, publications, and installation, he earned a BFA from the University of Hawaiʻi (1990) and an MFA from New York University (1994), spent roughly seventeen years in New York, and returned to Honolulu, where he co-founded the beloved ARS Cafe.

Approach. Casual yet calculated, Seward deploys tropical kitsch aesthetics to interrogate notions of “Paradise” — engaging tourism, mis/re/appropriation, environmental catastrophe, and the loss of the “real.” In Niu Systems, his contribution brings the niu into direct sculptural presence: painted, assembled forms that read at once as vessel, organism, and world, making its body — husk, opening, held interior — visible as a site of mystery rather than utility.

Selected works & exhibitions. End of the Rainbow (2014, SPF Projects); Rainbow Hash (2019, Aupuni Space); New Dawn Island for Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022. Represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC, for thirteen years; exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Aldrich Museum, and Gallery Edward Mitterand. His work is held in the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Dive deeper
Hawaiʻi Contemporary feature
Interview + audio (Hawaiʻi Public Radio)
ARS Cafe (co-founded)