She frequented the shop of furniture maker Yeun Kwock Fong Inn who often had Chinese ceramics and textile pieces sent from his brother in China.

In 1920, she and her daughter Alice (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), her daughter-in-law Dagmar (Mrs. Richard Cooke), and Catharine E. B. Cox (Mrs. Isaac Cox), an art and drama teacher, began to catalogue and research the collection with the intent to display the items in a museum for the children of Hawaii.

With little formal training, these women obtained a charter for the museum from the Territory of Hawaii in 1922, while continuing to catalogue each art treasure in the collection.

In 1924, Cooke hired the painter Frank Montague Moore as the first director of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

The Cookes donated their Beretania Street home for the museum, along with an endowment of $25,000 and several thousand works of art.

New York architect Bertram Goodhue designed the plans for a classic Hawaiian-style building with the mountains as a backdrop and colorful blossoming trees, flowers, and shrubs complementing the simple off-white exteriors and tiled roofs.