Grace Hudson Museum: Portrait of a People

In Ukiah, the Grace Hudson Museum preserves the life's work of an artist who spent fifty years painting the Pomo Indian peoples of Lake and Mendocino counties. Grace Carpenter Hudson was born in eighteen sixty-five and studied portraiture at the California School of Design in San Francisco before returning home to paint the community she had known since childhood. Over her career she completed more than six hundred eighty-four numbered portraits of Pomo individuals, earning national recognition during her lifetime.

Her husband, John Hudson, was an ethnologist who assembled an extraordinary collection of Pomo basketry and field notes. Together they lived in a craftsman home they called the Sun House, which they built in nineteen eleven, and which her nephew later gave to the City of Ukiah. The museum that opened alongside the Sun House in nineteen eighty-six holds the world's largest collection of Grace Hudson paintings, and it remains one of California's most focused records of indigenous life at the turn of the twentieth century.