The story
Anna Rice Cooke grew up in Honolulu among the children of missionaries, Hawaiians, Chinese and Japanese, and came to think a museum there should reflect that mix rather than import a European one wholesale. In 1927 she gave her own collection and her house's site to found this museum on the idea that East and West could hang under one roof.
The building, by Bertram Goodhue, is arranged around open courtyards and shallow pools, cool and low against the climate. Its strength is Asian art, one of the broadest such collections in the United States, from Japanese screens and prints to Chinese bronzes, alongside European rooms holding works by van Gogh, Monet and Gauguin.
Cooke set it up so that local schoolchildren would grow up walking these galleries, and the museum still sits on the block where her family home once stood.
