Hamon Family Entertainment: The Keeper
Albert Awanui Hamon
Part of the Hamon Family Entertainment whānau showcase. Albert’s art is his own: rights and ownership held by the artist.
Albert Awanui Hamon is Rei Hamon’s son and the keeper of the family’s art. His gallery leads with the line his father left him:
“What I learnt from my father Rei was not only the discipline of fine arts but to have compassion for all lifeforms and our interconnection with the universe.”
He is a multidisciplinary artist in the fullest sense: painting realism and surrealism, carving wood, bone and pounamu, and painting murals at scale. Born on the Thames Coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, Ngāti Porou, he trained through a Commercial Art course with the Australian Art Training Institute in Melbourne, and has carried the work across Aotearoa, Australia, Asia, South America including the Amazon, and eleven states of the USA. The New Zealand Government commissioned his large multidisciplinary piece Aoraki Family, in wood, shell and paint, for the Social Welfare Department building in Timaru, and his current series turns to Australian birds, wedge-tailed eagles among them.
The teaching years run deep. Albert tutored art, bone carving and ceramics for the Aoraki Youth Trust, helped redesign the natural history, Māori and early European sections of the Motueka and Timaru museums, and taught bone carving at Thames High School and at Matai Whitu Marae in Kopu. At Rotorua Boys’ High School he spent seven years as Artist in Residence, designed Māori art courses that were taken up by secondary schools across the country, and finished as Head of the Art Department. He was also elected to represent Kai Tahu and the Royal Forest and Bird Society in recommendations to government on creating marine parks.
Through all of it he has been the pou, the stronghold, of the Rei Hamon Gallery and Hamon Art NZ, organising exhibitions of his father’s work and his own across Aotearoa and Australia. Father and son together donated originals and limited edition lithographs to conservation charities for years, raising funds to protect endangered birds, especially the kōkako and the New Zealand dotterel. Albert is also a published author: the Ozzma and Kauai series, The Jade Hook and The Forbidden Wave. He is the reason this lineage has a living home, and the reason a kid in Edmonton grew up knowing exactly whose dots he descends from.
Albert’s full biography at Hamon Art → · Hamon Art: the gallery → · The Jade Hook, his books →