Galleries / Museums, Oahu

If you like Modern Art and you want a beautiful view of Honolulu from the hills behind the city, you can do no worse than the Contemporary Museum. Show up around 1:30 and you can get a docent to guide you through the collection, which usually features Hawaii artists working in a variety of media. Since it's modern art, having the docent helps!! Not only that, but the cafe is a nice place to get a soup & salad or sandwich.

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This place is very small and mostly unknown to the Island’s visitors, but it has its charm. Lucoral is a company that specializes in pearl and coral jewelry, and has a museum that shows some stones, pearls, and corals native to Hawaiian Islands ONLY.
If you have 30 minutes to spare that visit this place, it’s pretty interesting, although it’s quite chaotic for a museum. What I really liked was huge statues made of gem stones, some of them where over 1 meter high.
The highlight of this museum is its staff, very nice, friendly, and helpful. From a conversation with one of them I have learned that Lucoral works very close with local schools and kids are always welcome there to enjoy jewelry making lessons.
I was told that families with kids that are visiting the island are more than welcome to enjoy these activities.
Of course, like every other museum Lucoral has a gift shop which sells necklaces, bracelets and rings made company.
The entrance is free. The museum is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm and is located in the center on 2414 Kuhio Ave, not far from Kohio Beach.

Just off the Pali Highway is the little-visited Queen emma's Summer Palace, which disappoints at first glance because it hardly looks like a palace. In fact, it is an old New England home that was built in Boston and shipped around the horn for a local merchant, but ended up through inheritance in the hands of the Hawaiian royal family. So, if you give this little place a chance and take one of the excellent guided tours by the docents, you'll learn a great deal about life in Hawaii at the time of the very influential Christian missionaries.
You'll also learn a bit about Queen Emma, who was on the throne for four years before her young husband died of an illness caught while traveling to London (a fate all too typical of Hawaiian travelers). During an earlier stop in Washington D.C. in the 1860s, the King and Queen of Hawaii became the first royals from any country to be given an audience with a sitting U.S. president, Andrew Johnson (America's staunch republicanism is the reason it took so long).