Grace Hudson Museum & Sun House

Grace Carpenter Hudson grew up in Ukiah, California, then a frontier town. Her parents, A. O. and Helen Carpenter, ran their “Home Gallery” photography business from their Ukiah house, producing images of settlers, farming, logging, and the local Pomo people. Early in life, Grace Hudson assisted her parents in their photography studio by hand-coloring images. She attended the California School of Design in San Francisco.

Grace grew up knowing many Pomo families. Those contacts later gave her and her husband, Dr. John Hudson, the access they needed to document the Pomo culture through her portraiture and his research of their basketry, language, and customs. The local Pomo called her “The Painter Lady.” As one of the first women artists to paint Native Americans, she brought a new intimate, compassionate depiction of the women, children, and elders to American Western Art. This unique perspective propelled her career to one of great success.

Though she was best-known as a painter, Hudson worked in other media. In the 1890s, Grace illustrated a number of articles in Overland Monthly and other national magazines. She also designed rugs that were produced locally by hand. In the early 1930s, Grace designed and patented a family of rabbit boudoir dolls displayed in a pastoral wooded setting. Also at that time, she sculpted a prototype for a ceramic rabbit garden sculpture. She used her photography skills throughout her career, to document the people who appear in her paintings, and to document her paintings.

Grace and John Hudson, together with architect George Wilcox, set out to build a functional, custom, redwood Craftsman-style home scaled to the Hudsons’ needs. They built it just down the street from her parents’ home and the site of her first studio. The house was completed in 1911 and named “Sun House.” Fairly modest in size, it nonetheless accommodated Grace's prodigious artistic output and John's sizeable ethnographic collections. With the exception of short periods in Hawaii and Chicago, the bulk of Grace’s paintings and drawings, considered among the finest depictions of Native Americans in the world, were created in these neighbouring Ukiah studios. Now visitors can tour the Sun House, as well the Grace Hudson Museum, constructed in 1986 and expanded in 2001, which is located immediately behind the Sun House.