Solomon Enos’s Pala (Ripe) series is a new body of work created over the course of a month in a public space at the Hawai’i State Art Museum. Enos views his conversations with visitors as a collaborative act of creation, or Laulima (Many-Hands/Cooperation), and situates this as part of a larger effort to help cultivate creativity within the community.
In this work, Enos projects a vision of a future where waste produced by humanity—unlike the ocean’s “beautiful garbage” of sand and shells—can also possess beauty and return to the earth as soil and sand. Pala (Ripe) 1 depicts a future “junkyard” where discarded machine parts organically transform to support peaceful societies. Pala (Ripe) 2 is a verdant composition inspired by Hawaiian mythology, which has a worldview of plants and life in constant cycles. It shows individuals regenerating from a flower-like growth. Pala (Ripe) 3 depicts a fusion of a tree and a computer, with a future islander nested in a flower at its peak.
All three works reflect the ancient wisdom of learning to “dance” with nature, rather than to “fight” with it. They pose the question of whether human society can learn from the organic interconnectivity of forest creatures that share resources across different species.
This series is part of Enos’s concept of “Pasifika (Pacific) Futurism,”which carries the “cryptically hopeful” theme: that “a profoundly kinder world is possible, even if the path to get there isn’t clear.” Pala, the Hawaiian word for “Ripe,” embodies the idea that the time is “ripe” to harvest the potential to transform our problems into our solutions.

Solomon Enos is a Native Hawaiian artist who works across various mediums, including painting, murals, illustration, and community art. He has a history of creating works in public spaces and collaborating with communities on mural projects, emphasizing a practice centered on community engagement.
For Aichi Triennale 2025, Enos created this mural with the collaboration of over a thousand children and community members who participated in workshops at the Aichi Children’s Center and a nursery school in Seto City. The work is composed of more than 800 individual pieces of black drawing paper, on which participants made a series of marks and layered colors and dots freely, guided by a story presented by Enos.
The title, Laulima, is a Hawaiian word that means “many hands,” or “cooperation.” Through the workshops, Enos used the example of microorganisms in the soil to teach children about the significance of collective creation and the importance of cooperation in society. The very organic creative process highlighted the paradoxical relationship between the individual and the collective. Participants were encouraged to follow certain rules, but were also paradoxically invited to ignore them. The attempt to “try not to draw anything” effectively resulted in “drawing everything.” The orderly chaos created by the participants—like that found in the oceans below and the cosmos above—as the “natural force that creates art” vividly reflects Enos’s strong belief in creating the future together.