Spalding House, Art gallery in Makiki Heights, Honolulu, US.
Spalding House, also called the Cooke-Spalding House, is a former art museum and sculpture garden on 3+1⁄2 acres in Makiki Heights, Honolulu. The 1925 house, designed by Hart Wood and enlarged by Bertram Goodhue and Associates, holds about 5,000 square feet of gallery space, with doors by Robert Graham and Tony Berlant. It closed to the public in December 2019.
Spalding House was built in 1925 as a residence for Anna Rice Cooke, widow of Charles Montague Cooke, on 3.5 acres in Makiki Heights; Hart Wood designed it and Bertram Goodhue and Associates later enlarged it. Alice Spalding bequeathed the estate to the Honolulu Museum of Art in 1968, which ran it as an annex for Japanese prints until 1978. The Thurston Twigg-Smith family converted it into The Contemporary Museum in 1986, opening in October 1988 after interior renovation.
Anna Rice Cooke named the house Nuumealani, "heavenly terrace". The gardens were laid out from 1928 to 1941 as a Japanese stroll garden by Reverend K. H. Inagaki, a Christian minister of Japanese ancestry who travelled to Japan in 1941 to visit relatives and was never heard from again. Sculptures by Satoru Abe, George Rickey, Tom Wesselmann and Toshiko Takaezu stood on the grounds while the site was open as a museum.
Spalding House closed to the public in December 2019, after the Honolulu Museum of Art announced in July 2019 that it would sell the property, so the grounds and galleries cannot currently be visited. The estate occupies 3.5 acres in Makiki Heights, and the former museum building holds about 5,000 square feet of gallery space.
The garden's designer, Reverend K. H. Inagaki, travelled to Japan in 1941 to visit relatives and was never heard from again. Landscape architect James C. Hubbard revived the overgrown grounds in 1979–1980, and Leland Miyano reshaped them in the 1990s. The sculpture on view included works by Satoru Abe, George Rickey and Tom Wesselmann.
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