Samoa | Born Between Oceans: Memory, Mark, and Making

Exhibit date: March 7^th – April 25^th 

Opening Reception: March 7^th 3:30pm- 6:30pm @ Jade Choe Gallery

Nofo Porter

Public artist| Muralist

Nofo Porter is a queer Samoan painter and muralist. They reside in Tacoma, WA where they’ve spent the last 10 years creating public art. Their style is deeply inspired by tatau (Samoan tattoo), local graffiti artists, and local tattoo artists. Nofo’s artwork often has a collage-like feel to them, setting vibrant portraits against patterns echoing back to their Pasifika roots. Like many others growing up here, Nofo and their siblings are the first of both their mother and father’s side not to be born back home. Nofo is currently interested in examining what it means to be American born Samoan through their paintings. 

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Faaana Tili

Fashion Designer | Fiber Artist | Founder of Haute Polynesia

Faaana Tili is a Samoan fashion designer and fiber artist whose work bridges ancestral heritage and contemporary expression. Specializing in traditional and modern garments infused with Samoan prints, motifs, and cultural symbolism, her creations honor the past while boldly reimagining it for the present.

With over 15 years of experience in garment construction and design, Faaana’s foundation was shaped in downtown San Francisco, where she trained under master tailors and served as an apprentice for nearly nine years. There, she mastered precision tailoring, couture finishing techniques, and the discipline of high-level craftsmanship—skills that now anchor her work in both structure and storytelling.

As the founder of Haute Polynesia, Faaana creates custom garments and fiber-based art that celebrate Polynesian identity across generations. Her work ranges from traditional silhouettes such as puletasi and ie faitaga to contemporary couture, wearable art, and large-scale textile installations. Each piece reflects a dialogue between diaspora experience and cultural inheritance—between memory and making.

Deeply committed to environmental stewardship, Faaana approaches fashion through a sustainability lens. Concerned with the well-being of the earth, she intentionally reduces waste by working with fabric remnants, salvaged textiles, upcycled materials, and recycled fibers. Scraps become mosaics. Offcuts become adornments. What might be discarded is transformed into narrative. Through this practice, she challenges fast-fashion culture and models creative responsibility.

Her fiber art often incorporates textured scraps, visible threads, raw edges, and layered materials—honoring imperfection and process as reflections of identity itself. In both garment and installation, she explores themes of belonging, cultural memory, environmental resilience, and indigenous presence in the diaspora.

Faaana’s work is not only worn—it is felt, questioned, and remembered. Through fashion and fiber, she continues to sew together heritage, sustainability, and self-definition—one intentional stitch at a time.

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Curatorial Statement -Kellis Parlett-

In Samoan culture, the body and the cloth both carry a story.

In this exhibition, Nofo Porter and Faaana Tili approach identity as something both worn and inscribed stitched and tattooed constructed and remembered.

Nofo’s paintings pulse with vibrant portraiture layered against patterns inspired by tatau, graffiti, and tattoo culture. Their work reflects the lived experience of being American-born Samoan standing at the intersection of ancestral inheritance and contemporary urban influence. The faces they paint are not passive subjects; they are declarations. They ask: What does it mean to belong to a homeland you were not born into, yet carry within you?

In parallel, Faaana Tili’s garments and fiber-based works operate as cultural architecture. Drawing from traditional silhouettes such as the puletasi and ie faitaga, she reimagines Samoan forms through sustainability and diaspora consciousness. Fabric remnants, salvaged textiles, and visible threads become metaphors for migration and memory. What is discarded is reclaimed. What is fragmented is reconstructed. Her work challenges fast-fashion culture while honoring Indigenous knowledge systems rooted in stewardship.

Together, these artists engage in a shared act of reclamation. One works through paint and pattern; the other through cloth and construction. Both insist that cultural identity is not static—it is layered, adaptive, and alive.

“Born Between Oceans” is not about nostalgia. It is about presence.

It is about artists who refuse erasure.

It is about heritage not as a fixed point, but as something continuously made.

In their hands, art becomes both shield and offering—an act of remembrance and a declaration of becoming.