Boone Morrison
Boone Morrison was Volcano’s Renaissance man. Photographer, architect, writer, musician, teacher, preservationist, art center founder, documentary producer, teacher, historian, model train maker. Those were just some of the ways he touched lives in almost five decades of living in Volcano.
Morrison, who died in 2018, is remembered today for his role in founding the Volcano Art Center, his stunning photos of lava and hula dancers, and a legacy of new and restored homes and buildings throughout Hawaiʻi island. More than that, he was a source of talent and energy that influenced many other aspects of village life,
Morrison was born in California to an artistic family. His grandfather was a voice and piano teacher; his grandmother and mother were weavers. Morrison moved to Hawaiʻi in 1959 after graduating from Stanford University, started his own architectural modeling company and worked, and helped found an influential art gallery in Honolulu, The Foundry. He also co-founded the environmental group Life of the Land with Gavan Daws and Tony Hodges.
Morrison moved to the Volcano area in the early 1970s and spent the rest of his life there. “I happen to love old towns,” he said while working on a series of television documentaries called “The Restoration of Hawaiʻi’ s Future,” which showed how small island towns could be kept commercially viable while preserving their unique flavor, a theme that would appear over and over again in his work.
Whether it was helping to bring classic buildings like the Palace Theater and Volcano Block Building back to life in Downtown Hilo and elsewhere, documenting the historic homes of Volcano or designing new ones, Morrison was committed to keeping old values alive in new ways. His homes blended Hawaiʻi’s traditionally gracious kamaʻaina styling with contemporary approaches in design. His motto, his wife Tamara said, was “ahead of the times by honoring the past.”
Nothing better reflects Morrison’s commitment to those values than his role in founding the Volcano Art Center in the original Volcano House built in 1877, which by the early 1970s was all but abandoned, in decay and being used as a storage shed. Today the building is a vibrant gallery displaying the art of nearly 300 Hawai’i artists whose works are strongly influenced by Kīlauea. The Art Center also has expanded to include a separate five-acre campus in Volcano village that hosts a variety of activities, including art classes, movie showings, dance and musical events, and more in a forest preserve setting.
Morrison was also the moving force behind the construction of a pa hula (hula platform) for performances in the national park. In the late 1970s, Morrison brought up the idea with revered kumu hula Edith Kanakaole, who visited the proposed site and gave it her blessing. It remains dedicated exclusively to performances of hulu kahiko.
Among his other accomplishments, Morrison produced several books of island photography, made a documentary about life and music in the South Kona fishing village of Miloliʻi, played music in several bands, led classes for many years at the art center, wrote a fictionalized memoir of an island builder, and even once went back to his family’s homeland in Kentucky to participate in a tribute to one of his direct ancestors, Daniel Boone.
His photographs are in museums collections from Honolulu to New York City. And his detailed and historically accurate model of Occidental, California, is displayed in the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
