Artists of Hawaii: Reuben Tam (1916 - 1991)
Reuben Tam.View from Blackhead, 1959. Reuben Tam was born in Hawaii, educated at the University of Hawaii and at Columbia, lived in Manhattan, and had summered for many years on Monhegan island off the cost of Maine. He was the senior painting instructor at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and has shared his insights with students at such widely separated institutions as Oregon State University in Corvallis and Skowhegan in Maine. On Monhegan, his perennial rock garden (which winter storms oblige his perennially to restore each May) is the joy of the island. He was first shown in New York by Edith Gregor Halpert at her Downtown Gallery in 1945 and today his work is included in the permanent collections of almost every major museum in the United States. A painter of the eventful in nature, Tam joins in his art a profound understanding of how nature works with a poet's gift for the lyric impulse. Since he is a poet as well as a painter, two of his poems are published here for t...