The exhibition Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art explores the impact of a single high school on visual art in Hawaiʻi. It brings together work by six artists who graduated from McKinley High School in the 1920s to the 1960s and went on to define modernism in Hawaiʻi, including Saturo Abe (b. 1926), Ralph Iwamoto (1927–2013), ʻImaikalani Kalahele (b.1950), Keichi Kimura (1914–1988), Robert Kobayashi (1925–2015) and John Chin Young (1909–1997). Foregrounding the importance of art education, the exhibition also presents work by three artists who were their high school teachers, Minnie Fujita (1918–2018), Charles Higa (1933–2012), and Shirley Russell (1886–1985). While each artist was shaped by their different background and experiences in the art world, Home of the Tigers charts the history of 20th century artistic movements in Hawaiʻi and beyond through the lens of their common origin.

McKinley High School, just down the street from the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA), is one of Honolulu’s oldest and largest public high schools. Its student population has historically represented a cross-section of Honolulu, and the school has served large numbers of economically disadvantaged students from Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. Several artists of Japanese descent, including Abe, Kimura, Kobayashi, and Iwamoto, studied art in New York after World War II and became gallery attendants and groundskeepers at the Museum of Modern Art. While Kobayashi and Iwamoto remained in New York, Abe and Kimura returned to Hawaiʻi and became significant figures in the development of modernism in the islands alongside John Young, the son of Chinese immigrants. In addition to his work in painting and sculpture, Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) artist Kalahele  also became a renowned poet and activist.