Our Story
Meet the Artist
Ezgi Iraz is the founder of Studio Kōlea—a visual artist and storyteller whose work is an act of love, resistance, and cultural remembrance. Based on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, her practice explores rest as a birthright for women of color within systems built on their labor, belonging as a bridge between cultures, and the quiet power of visual storytelling through painting, photography, and community-centered projects.
Originally from Istanbul, Ezgi Iraz is a Turkish American whose creative journey mirrors the migration of the kōlea bird—the Pacific Golden Plover—whose seasonal flight carries it across oceans, always returning. Her path has taken her from design studios across Europe to the islands of Hawaiʻi, where she now creates work that holds memory, tenderness, and the possibility of return.
An award-winning creative art director, Ezgi Iraz spent decades shaping visual narratives in European advertising. She studied in Milano and worked throughout Denmark, with her final role before relocating to Hawaiʻi as Creative Art Director at LEGO in Billund, at the heart of the company’s global headquarters.
During her time at LEGO, Ezgi Iraz broke barriers around representation in advertising, bringing a new perspective that challenged industry norms for LEGO. She created LEGO’s first campaign centering children of color—not as background figures, but as the protagonists: the smart ones, the winners, the heroes at the center of the story. This work was not simply about inclusion. It was about reshaping whose intelligence, whose joy, and whose imagination gets celebrated and seen.
Much like Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design on Oʻahu—which serves as a bridge of understanding, bringing the beauty and complexity of Islamic cultures to the Pacific—Ezgi Iraz’s work creates space for cultural dialogue and belonging. Just as Shangri La holds and honors Islamic artistic traditions within Hawaiʻi’s multicultural landscape, Ezgi Iraz weaves Ottoman/Turkic/Persian heritage, Islamic visual languages, and Hawaiian cultural elements into her practice. Her art becomes a living museum of sorts—not one that preserves culture behind glass, but one that breathes, adapts, and invites others into understanding.
Through her paintings, she offers what Shangri La offers through its collection: a tender, scholarly, and deeply personal invitation to see beauty, intellect, and rest in bodies and cultures that have too often been rendered invisible or reduced to labor. Both spaces—the museum and the studio—exist as acts of love, education, and cultural stewardship in a place where many worlds meet.
Resting in Muʻumuʻu
A painting series by Ezgi Iraz
Resting in Muʻumuʻu is an ongoing acrylic painting series that centers women of color and the quiet, radical act of rest. In a world that has historically extracted labor from the bodies and souls of people of color, this work honors rest as resistance—a reclaiming of time, dignity, and presence.
Ezgi Iraz shares:
"I paint rest for women of color. My mother did not rest a day until she turned 70. Even now, she cannot rest—her mind tells her she is useless if she does. That mindset was shaped by the system. So my paintings are reminders. They are an offering. A reshaping of hustle culture. A declaration that women of color deserve rest. Rest is our birthright.
It might look gentle to you. It might even look naive. But with each brushstroke, I manifest rest for women. And with each painting that people look at—truly look at—I help their minds rewire. The woman of color becomes a subject of admiration not through sexualization, but through her intellect, her ease, holding a book, her refusal to perform. She is safe, so she—they—them—is resting.
The muʻumuʻu was brought to Hawaiʻi around the 1800s by missionaries to cover the bodies of Hawaiian wāhine. I acknowledge that the muʻumuʻu has a colonial origin. I paint women in muʻumuʻu not to erase that history, but to honor what the garment has become—a symbol reclaimed, reshaped, and loved within local culture. Complex histories deserve to be held with care, not erased. While I'm aware that this is a fragile place to be, art is always subjective so you are welcome to take it as you please.
I am a Turkish American woman of color and an artist who believes deeply in love/aşk. I am part of the Mevlevi tradition—you may know it through the Mesnevi, or through the beloved Rumi, whose poetry on love/aşk has traveled the world.My grandmother is Persian Turkish comes from a lineage of Mesnevi. I have a complex relationship with religious authorities and strongly believe that beliefs are between a person and the Creator and no one else’s business. I have respect to all believe systems who does not discriminate and hurt others. Mevlevi philosophy as Rumi says: "Come, come as who ever you are."
There is no place for hate in my heART."
The muʻumuʻu appears throughout this series as a symbol of comfort, femininity, and local identity—worn not as restriction, but as ease and comfort.
Through carved tea tables, patterned rugs, and ceramic vases, Ezgi Iraz weaves together visual languages from Hawaiʻi, Ottoman heritage, and Islamic arts. Her paintings create spaces that hold memory, tenderness, and the possibility of belonging across borders.
The Kōlea: A Name Rooted in Migration and Return
Hawaiian: Kōlea
English: Pacific Golden Plover
Turkish: Altın yağmurcunu (Pasifik altın yağmurcunu)
English: Pacific Golden Plover
Turkish: Altın yağmurcunu (Pasifik altın yağmurcunu)
Studio Kōlea is named after the kōlea bird, whose annual migration across the Pacific reflects Ezgi Iraz’s own ancestral journey—from the Altai Mountains, through Istanbul, across Europe, and finally to Hawaiʻi. The kōlea does not migrate to escape. It migrates to return. The name honors themes of movement, memory, and belonging that span cultures, languages, and oceans.
Studio Kōlea Values
Within systems built on speed, extraction, and exhaustion, other ways of being are already alive.
Studio Kōlea is grounded in rest, care, and cultural remembrance. Our work is guided by the belief that slowing down is not a failure of ambition—it is a return to balance, to breath, to what is sacred.
The muʻumuʻu carries a complex and layered history in Hawaiʻi, and it continues to live today as part of aloha wear. As Tory Laitila, curator of textiles and historic arts at the Honolulu Museum of Art, noted in the Fashioning Aloha exhibition: “These garments seem simple at first glance, but they contain the history of Hawaiʻi and all the influences that came together to form the creative culture here.”
We approach the muʻumuʻu as a garment shaped by resilience, creativity, and care—one that reflects ease, celebration of local creativity and presence rather than restriction or performance.
We create space for rest as a form of resistance, and for creativity as an act of care. Studio Kōlea honors making that is rooted in lineage, land, and lived experience—not urgency or endless extraction.
Our values are simple and intentional:
- Rest over urgency.
- Care over productivity.
- Presence over performance.
- Enough of excess.
- Cultural memory over disposability.
- Making with intention over endless output.
Studio Kōlea is a space for returning to body, to breath, to land, and to self.
The future we tend is shaped by what we choose to protect with our time, our hands, and our aloha/aşk.
Land Acknowledgement & Community Commitment
Studio Kōlea acknowledges that we live and work on the traditional lands of Native Hawaiians. We offer our deep respect to the poʻe kānaka maoli of this place and recognize that the ongoing presence, knowledge, and stewardship of Hawaiian and immigrant communities shape these islands culturally.
We are committed to continuous learning, accountability, and supporting local communities through care-centered, reciprocal relationships.
We already work with Local nonprofits & community organizations, and if you are one and interested in collaborating with us, we would be honored to connect.