The “Ocean of Peace” represents a framework that was endorsed by Pacific Islands leaders in 2025, envisioning a future for the Pacific region as a space of harmony and cooperation drawn from traditional values and cultural customs.

This year’s festival features six contemporary artists of Micronesian heritage who will display artwork from the landmark Ocean of Peace exhibit, which opened at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center in January 2026: James Bamba (Guåhan/Northern Mariana Islands), Carol Ann Carl (Pohnpei), Gillian Dueñas (Guåhan), Kalany Omengkar (Belau/Northern Mariana Islands), Anthony Watson (Belau), and Lissette Yamase (Chuuk). These artists integrate the beliefs and practices of their Micronesian cultures with lived experiences in the Hawaiian Islands to build connections across island chains, expressing ways to collectively realize an ocean of peace.

The exhibition’s curatorial team includes Jonathan Yukio Clark, Director of Schaefer International Gallery at Maui Arts & Cultural Center; Mary Therese Perez Hattori, EdD, Director of the Pacific Islands Development Program at East-West Center (Retired); Eric Chang, Arts Program Manager at East-West Center; and Annie Reynolds, PhD, Curator of East-West Center Gallery.

Artist Bios

Anthony Watson
Art is a way for Anthony Watson to explore and express all of his heritages — Belauan, African American, Japanese, and Korean. His work also reflects the influences and connections with Melanesian and Polyensian cultures present in Belau and Hawai’i. He earned a BFA from the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa, has received numerous awards for his art, and is a teacher, mentor, and innovator who shares his cultural and artistic expertise with others. Anthony is a contemporary artist whose practice is clearly grounded in traditional art, from the adzes he carves, forges, and lashes to the canoes, haircombs, axes, and ladles he sculpts and shapes with those adzes.

Carol Ann Carl
Carol Ann Carl is an emerging, Native Pohnpeian writer, scholar, and poet whose work bridges science, story, and ancestral knowledge. She holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where she is completing her M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies. Her research examines socioecological literacy within Pohnpei’s Ancestral Seafaring Knowledge, uncovering the science woven into oral traditions. Her poetry and creative scholarship have been featured by the Celebrate Micronesia Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, and UC Berkeley’s Art Research Center, where she was a Spring 2023 Poetry & the Senses Fellow.

Gillian Dueñas
Gillian is a mixed-race Chamoru (Guåhan) woman who was born and raised in Bremerton, WA. Self-taught, she began acrylic painting when she started college as a means of healing and connecting to her cultural identity. Her art centers her stories and perspectives as an Indigenous woman told through traditional legends, motifs, and aesthetics brought into a modern context. Themes that Gillian centers in her art include matriarchy, vulnerability, Indigeneity, and healing. Gillian has worked in the past as a clinical social worker, integrating art and creativity as a mode of therapy and healing. She is also currently pursuing an MA in Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

James Bamba
Born with a coconut leaf on one hand and a pandanus leaf on the other, James C. Bamba is an enthusiastic traditional and contemporary Chamorro cultural practitioner native to the land of Guåhan. Surrounded by weavers, James was fortunate to get a first hand experience of learning to weave from his aunties, uncles, and grandparents. Although weaving was not an everyday practice in his family, his unwavering passion for weaving never faltered.

Kalany Omengkar
Kalany Omengkar (b. Saipan) is a Hawaiʻi-based illustrator, designer, and creative director whose work bridges Pacific cultures and contemporary storytelling. Growing up between Saipan and Hawaiʻi shaped his understanding of what it means to carry multiple homes in one heart. A perspective that flows through everything he creates. Omengkar’s practice moves fluidly between illustration, fine art, and graphic design. His work for documentary films, editorial outlets, and galleries statewide centers island voices and stories that often go unheard. Drawing from both Pacific island and Micronesian visual traditions, he creates pieces that speak to the complexities of Pacific identity, celebrating cultural pride while honestly addressing the realities of diaspora, community resilience, and the ongoing work of cultural preservation.

Lissette Yamase
Lissette Yamase is a proud daughter of the Micronesian diaspora with ancestral roots in Chuuk and Pohnpei, part of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). As a cultural artist and storyteller, her work serves as a vessel for preserving and celebrating the rich identities, values, and cultural practices of her home islands. Grounded in oral tradition and community knowledge, her visual storytelling serves as a tool for healing and a platform for advocacy, sparking dialogue around critical issues faced by the Micronesian diaspora today: health inequities, policy reform, mental health, and education. Her art also confronts the long lasting impacts of colonization, intergenerational trauma, displacement, climate change, exploitation of native lands, and systemic discrimination — which highlights shared adversities among Indigenous communities globally.