A few months ago I visited the San Francisco Airport’s in-lobby art exhibit on Polynesian Pop. The display was fantastic -- a lot of great collectables and ephemera from both the midcentury and the current Tiki revival. Humuhumu, her Mom (who was travelling that day) and I browsed the exhibit for quite some time. Taking it all in, something caught my eye, and it wasn’t any of the pieces in the exhibit, but what was behind them. The back of the display case was lined with a huge print of faux Hawaiian patterns.

You can see the wallpaper in in the background of this photo:

For a good fifteen minutes or so I didn’t think too much about it outside of my admiration of its style. That is, until Humu and I were passing by it one more time as we saw her mom off to her gate. Something was odd about it. Although I didn’t reconize the pattern, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had acttually done it. I mean, had I done it for one of my tiki web projects and the airport curators just, uh, borrowed it for the exhibit?

When we got home, I was able to validate my suspicions. The exhibit’s pattern was an exact duplicate of a tapa pattern I had done for Humuhumu’s site Ooga-Mooga. The curators had changed the colors and redrawn it at about one hundred times its original size, but the pattern itself remained unchanged.

Here’s my image from Ooga-Mooga:

And two from the exhibit:

Overall I was happily suprised and flattered to discover that they had used my design, and there’s no hard feelings about it. They didn’t notify Humu or I, and they didn’t give me credit on the image per-se, although they did mention our names and websites in the accompanying text. I’m actually a bit more suprised and a little embarassed that it took me as long as it did to detect my own work, and that my initial reaction was admiration rather than reconition. I’ve had my website patterns taken and used without my permission before, but never on a scale like this. It is wild to think that the image started as a 1.5 inch gif file and ended up as a five foot tall piece of real-world wallpaper.

I don’t know how long the exhibit is running for, but if you’re in the San Francisco Airport and have some time to kill, go over to the international terminal and see if it’s still there. You don’t need to have boarding passes to see it; it’s in an unsecured section of the terminal. Here’s Humuhumu’s blog post and photos. Thanks to Humu for letting me use her photos.

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