Makawao Paniolo Maui Ceramic Art Tile
— — a cowboy town older than Cheyenne.
Not only on a wall.
“A small town on the western slope of Haleakalā where the cattle work began in 1832, when King Kamehameha III sent for vaqueros from Mexico. The paniolo learned to rope and ride here a generation before the American mainland did the same. The false-front buildings on Baldwin Avenue still wear their plantation-era paint, and the air smells of eucalyptus and horses. Every Fourth of July weekend the rodeo at Oskie Rice Arena fills with the great-grandchildren of those first paniolo. The rest of the year it is quiet, cool, and sixteen hundred feet above the coast.
Makawao Paniolo Maui Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Makawao sits on the western slope of Haleakalā at about 1,640 feet, in the upcountry region of Maui. It is a town of roughly 7,000 people, reached by Baldwin Avenue from Pā'ia on the north shore or by Olinda Road from the south. The slope rises into the Makawao Forest Reserve, a tract of eucalyptus and pine the Territory of Hawaii planted in the early twentieth century to anchor the upland soil. Above the town the road continues to Kula and on to the rim of the Haleakalā crater. Below, the slope falls about seven miles to the Pacific. The cattle ranches that defined the town, Haleakalā Ranch and Ulupalakua, still surround it.
Hawaii's paniolo tradition runs through this town, decades older than the American mainland cowboy. In 1832, King Kamehameha III brought in Mexican vaqueros to teach Hawaiians how to manage the cattle herds that had multiplied across the islands since Captain Vancouver's gift of 1793. The Hawaiians called the visitors español, which became paniolo. By the time Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was touring the mainland in the 1880s, three generations of paniolo had been working the slopes of Haleakalā. In 1908, the paniolo Ikua Purdy won the World Steer Roping Championship in Cheyenne, Wyoming, against the best of the American West. Every Fourth of July weekend the town holds the Makawao Rodeo and Parade at the Oskie Rice Arena. The bleachers fill with families whose names go back to those first ranches.
The upcountry climate is what surprised the first paniolo: cool, eucalyptus-scented, often misted in by the trade winds that catch on Haleakalā's western slope. At 1,640 feet Makawao sits above the Pacific's daytime heat and below the cloud line where the slope cools sharply toward the 10,023-foot summit. Mornings often start in soft fog that burns off by mid-morning; afternoons run in the high 60s and low 70s most of the year. The eucalyptus stands in the Makawao Forest Reserve were planted by the Territory of Hawaii in the early twentieth century to anchor the soil; they now hold the smell that locals know as upcountry: resin, horse, wet dust on a paddock road. Coastal Maui's heat is twenty minutes downhill, and feels much further.