Journalist.  Painter. Home designer.  Textile artist. In just the first chapter of his amazing life, John “Keoni” Meigs was all of these things.  He began his career designing aloha shirts while living in Honolulu prior to World War II. Between 1938 and 1951, Meigs created as many as three hundred different textile designs, many of which are now recognized as classics.  In his prints Meigs tried to depict, in his words, “what’s really Hawaiian without being pedestrian,” including a series of designs based on Gauguin’s Tahitian wood block prints and tapa patterns kept at the Bishop Museum.

According to Meigs, “In a sense, Aloha shirts put Hawaii on the map. The first thing people did when they arrived was make a beeline for a department store to buy one. A lot of kooky things were designed, but I always tried to be a purist when it came to using motifs from Hawaiian sources.”