The O’Keeffe Brand, Dole Foods, and Colonialism in Hawai‘i

In 1939 Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to the U.S. Territory of Hawai‘i to fulfill a commission for the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. Her expenses were paid for in return for two paintings to be used in advertisements for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company), an enterprise entangled with the conquest of Hawai‘i. James Dole built his pineapple empire on the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous Hawaiians by U.S. missionaries, businessmen, and politicians. Famous for her modern, seemingly apolitical, and distinctive paintings of flowers—the O’Keeffe brand, so to speak—O’Keeffe was a good fit for the Dole commission. Dole advertisements relied on pervasive colonial visual tropes that pictured Hawai‘i as an untouched tropical paradise, a message conveyed via representations of Native Hawaiian women and/or flowers. Even as O’Keeffe attempted to challenge conventional representations of the Islands in some of her canvases, her Hawai‘i paintings, especially as they appeared in Dole advertisements, nevertheless worked to justify and naturalize the conquest of Hawai‘i. Regardless of her intentions, O’Keeffe’s Hawai‘i paintings participated in the highly racialized project of political, economic, and cultural colonialism. So too have contemporary exhibitions of these paintings, which reiterate standard narratives about O’Keeffe’s ability to capture a unique sense of place and largely elide the connection between O’Keeffe’s paintings, Dole Foods, and ongoing colonialism in Hawai‘i. These exhibitions tend to be organized by institutions that have a stake in maintaining the O’Keeffe brand and sponsored by corporations invested in marketing Hawai‘i as the “Paradise of the Pacific.”