Art

Introducing David Hume Kennerly: The Hotel Lucia Collection

At Hotel Lucia, we are proud to be home to the world’s largest permanent collection of black-and-white photographs by Pulitzer prize-winning photographer and Oregon native, David Hume Kennerly.

One of the world’s most accomplished photographers, Kennerly has a resumé of high-profile commissions from Newsweek, LIFE, NBC and Time, and served as President Gerald R. Ford’s personal photographer. At the age of 25, Kennerly won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his photos of the Vietnam, Cambodian Civil and India-Pakistan Wars, as well as the Ali-Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden.

During your stay, we invite you to explore the 680 David Hume Kennerly photographs on permanent display throughout our public spaces, corridors and guest rooms.

A wall decorated with framed photographs in a cozy, warmly-lit room featuring a small round table, chairs, and wood-paneled walls ends the sentence.
A wall decorated with framed photographs in a cozy, warmly-lit room featuring a small round table, chairs, and wood-paneled walls ends the sentence.

As you enter the Hotel Lucia lobby, find yourself riveted by images that capture milestone moments in international history and popular culture, including shots of Hugh Hefner with a bevy of bunnies and Nixon boarding the presidential helicopter on his last day in office.

Peruse the hallways and explore a diverse array of images, ranging from John McCain campaigning for President, to Jerry and Kramer landing in prison on the final episode of Seinfeld. And don’t miss the brilliant, celebrated shot of First Lady Betty Ford dancing on the Cabinet Room table the day before departing the White House.

Jay Backstrand

Jay Backstrand is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter born in 1934. The Oregon native studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, as well as the Slade School at the University of London (UK) underneath a Fulbright Fellowship. His work has been featured in numerous key galleries and museums, including the National Gallery in Washington D.C. After teaching art at PNCA for 11 years, he was honored with a 10-year retrospective at Marylhurst College in Oregon. Most of his work has taken place and been showcased in the western United States where he resides.

John Buck

John Buck is an American artist mostly known for his bronze sculptures and woodblock prints. He was born in Ames, Iowa in 1946 and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1968 with a BFA. He’s professionally studied art and sculpture across the United States from Maine to California and eventually became a teaching assistant at UC Davis in 1971. He continued creating and teaching at universities in England and Montana until 1990. In recent years, Buck has turned to intricate mechanical kinetic sculptures, taking inspiration from the cultural imagery of his two homes -- one located in Bozeman, MT and the other on the Big Island of Hawaii -- as well as other current events.

Robert Colescott

Robert Colescott (1925 - 2009) was born in Oakland, California and was a part of the neo-expressionism movement. After establishing his career in Portland, he strives to traverse art history and offer a satirical take on the issues of race, beauty, and American culture. Coming from an African American background, Colescott couldn’t help but notice the absence of black men and women as protagonists in dominant cultural and social narratives. This led him to reimagine iconic artworks and push the boundaries with controversial imagery and a blunt, sometimes crude, gestural painting style. His works are meant to make the viewer slightly uncomfortable and question the artists’ inspiration further.

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler (1928 - 2011) was a second-generation American postwar abstractionist painter from Manhattan, New York. She is widely credited for playing a role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting, through her invention of the soak-stain technique. She expanded the possibilities of abstract art, while often uniquely referencing landscape and figuration in her work. Frankenthaler was a big fan of dynamically utilizing negative space, bold colors, and suggestive shapes with her complex and labor-intensive works. Her work is showcased across the Unites States, as well as Canada, Australia, and Paris.

Matt Gray

Matt Gray is an American artist born in 1969 and the owner of Gray Creates Productions. He uses many different mediums in his work including Iris prints, found in his Stupid Candy collection in Hotel Lucia – his only show on the west coast. He says that he was intrigued by the way the light hits the translucent candy, creating a neon effect. He currently resides in Baltimore.

Gregory Grenon

Gregory Grenon (1949 - 2022) is a midwestern native that kickstarted his public career in Portland in the late 1970s, after moving from Detroit. He spent most of his time creating works focusing on women’s faces and bodies, using deeply color-saturated oil-on-glass paintings that suggest both folk-art vigor and psychological portraiture. Most of these pieces are painted on the reverse sides of glass, giving them an evanescent shine. Grenon passed in early 2022 after nearly 50 years in the Portland art scene, but his art lives on and is showcased all around the Pacific Northwest.

Jackie K. Johnson

Jackie K. Johnson is a contemporary artist born in 1951 in Pendleton, Oregon and graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She uses vivid colors and iconic shapes that explore both internal and external landscapes through densely composed imagery. Her work is exclusively exhibited in the United States and occasionally showcases her new pieces in the Pacific Northwest region.

Lester Johnson

Lester Johnson (1919 - 2010) was an expressionist painter from Minnesota who studied at the Minneapolis School of Art. He moved to New York in 1947, where he spent most of his professional artistic career, experimenting with postwar themes. One of the more notable moments in his career included being rewarded the Guggenheim fellowship and the St. Paul Gallery Scholarship. His work is showcased across the United States.

Fay Jones

Fay Jones is a Seattle-based artist who showcases most of her work in the Pacific Northwest. Originally born in Boston, Jones earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1957 and grew up surrounded by different artists and writers. She paints playful and provocative images using a variety of characters in a surrealist style that alludes to comical and unpredictable narratives.

Zach Kircher

Zach Kircher was active in the Portland art scene from the late 90s up until 2009. He is no longer active in the market.

Carl Morris

Carl Morris (1911 – 1993) is an American artist, originally from California, whose career flourished in Portland after moving here in the early 1940s. He studied in Chicago, Vienna, and Paris before settling in the Pacific Northwest. His large and powerful paintings attempt to capture the pure beauty of nature through abstract and expressive elements, while evoking a transcendental dialogue that produces a psychological impact.

Lucinda Parker

Lucinda Parker is a Boston native that established her artistic career here in the Pacific Northwest. She received a joint BA from Reed College and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, as well as an MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York. Her style is described as ‘expressive cubist’, utilizing strong visible brush strokes and bold colors. She resides in Portland after a lengthy career publicly showcasing her works all around the west coast.

JD Perkin

JD Perkin is a Portland native who began showcasing their artwork in 1982. They received a BS from Portland State University in 1984 with a focus on Anthropology, as well as the Award of Excellence in Painting from the School of Fine & Performing Arts. He’s progressed his artistic career into other mediums like sculpting and creates figurative ceramic sculptures using rich and organic surfaces. His human forms often have a dynamic and meditative presence to them.

Michele Russo

Michele Russo (1909 – 2004) was originally from Waterbury, Connecticut and moved to Portland, Oregon in 1947 with his spouse and fellow artist, Sally Haley. Russo graduated from Yale in 1934 and taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art for over 25 years. He was an active advocate for the arts in the politically charged 1950s and the founder of the Portland Center for Visual Arts. Russo was also the first artist appointed to the Metropolitan Arts Commission in the 1970s. His work has been showcased nationally and he was honored with a fifty-year retrospective at the Portland Art Museum in 1998. His works typically include figurative paintings that explore the human form and condition. The Russo Lee Gallery remains open in Nob Hill district of Portland.

Michael Spafford

Michael Spafford (1935 – 2022) was born in Palm Springs, California; he received a bachelor’s from Pomona College and a master’s from Harvard University. During his career as a painter and printmaker he has received numerous awards, including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the first Behnke Foundation “Neddy” award and a Flintridge Foundation Award. In 1967 he was given the prestigious Rome Prize and was honored in 1983 with an art award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, NYC. For a while, he held the Professor Emeritus position at the University of Washington School of Art, which helped him establish his career from coast to coast. In 2005, he was invited to be the Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College – concluding in a major exhibition of his recent paintings. Spafford was a painter devoted to his work with inspiring rigor, humility, and depth.

Paul Green

Paul Green ceased painting a while back and was formerly a Russo gallery local artist – many of his paintings have a 15th century feeling and his focus was 1960s small idiosyncratic paintings.

Herb Williams

Herb Williams is a southern sculptor born in Montgomery, AL in 1973. He received a BFA from Birmingham-Southern College and is currently working out of Nashville, TN. He is one of the only individuals in the world who holds an account with Crayola, creating original sculptures out of hundreds, sometimes thousands of crayons. His work has been showcased in public arenas, such as children’s hospitals, corporate lobbies, museum walls, the White House, and more.

Michael Brophy

Michael Brophy, born in 1960, is an artist who graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1985 and later became a professor at the same university. His work is widely showcased throughout the west coast of the United States. He remains a local artist and very active at the Russo Lee Gallery in the Nob Hill district of Portland.