Richard Kessler brings his passion for arrowheads to Grand Bohemian Lodge
Richard Kessler and Tom Snyder share a little something in common: arrowheads. Kessler, the hotelier whose Grand Bohemian Lodge just opened last August in downtown Greenville, got his first such Native American artifact from his grandmother when he was five years old. Snyder, who works for a banking company in a Chicago suburb, grew up looking for them.
Snyder and his wife, Christine, were in town for a few days in November, attending a business meeting and staying at the boutique hotel overlooking the Reedy River. While enjoying a gorgeous afternoon, the Snyders shared their thoughts about the Indigenous artworks inside.
“I walked through there, just kind of checked it out,” he says of the first-floor event space that showcases Kessler’s breathtaking collection of pointed projectiles. “Being from Wyoming, it’s a big deal, and that was a big draw for me, the arrowheads. As a kid growing up, you’re always looking for those. All this just ties right into my heritage, I really like it.”
So does Kara Soper, the hotel’s gallery director. She points out the way the hundreds—if not more than 1,000—of them are displayed in uniformly sized frames. With colors ranging from white to ebony, from gold to red to green, the arrowheads are arranged by the dozens in different configurations: swirls and circles and arcs.
Arrowhead Collection at Grand Bohemian Lodge
“The patterns that are created, someone put thought into the aesthetics that those objects have,” Soper says, adding, “I really respected Mr. Kessler’s desire to display these as something beyond artifacts.”
The first time she saw the collection, she was impressed. “As a curator, I’m always paying attention to the way that things are displayed and the way the viewer is interacting with the work, so for me, I felt like they seem to be displayed more as fine art pieces.”
After all, she points out that since these tools no longer serve the purpose they were designed for 10,000 years ago, “You’re looking at pieces that toe the line between art and craft.”
Mark Tanner discovered the arrowheads over forty years within 400 yards of each other on his four-acre farm in southeastern Georgia, according to Kessler Collection research. The collection includes artifacts from several periods, including the Paleo and Archaic periods, and comes from an area once inhabited by members of the Creek tribe. Some of the arrowheads are thought to date back to 8000 BC.
Kessler purchased the Tanner Bay Collection, as it’s known, in 2022 and chose to display the artifacts in his Greenville property, on land that once belonged to Native Americans.
“Did Mr. Kessler put the arrowheads here because this is on Cherokee land, specifically? No, but there is a nice connection,” Soper says.
Christine Snyder, perched on a bench alongside her husband, who stood next to the towering statue of a Native American warrior looming at the hotel’s entrance, says she appreciates that Kessler not only bought the collection but brought it to Greenville.
“They were sitting there with no story,” she says of the carved stones buried since about the 16th century in Screven County, Georgia. “Now, he’s brought a story behind them, behind these arrowheads.”
Grand Design
Richard Kessler, who started picking up quartz and lava rocks around railroad tracks near his Georgia home, has been collecting art for decades. As Kara Soper, the hotel’s gallery director, explains: “Mr. Kessler has been collecting Indigenous art and artifacts for well over three decades now. He is a very astute art collector. He has spent the better part of his life collecting art, and while he has other interests, this particular hotel and this particular property are geared specifically toward Indigenous art.”
Kessler owns The Kessler Collection, which includes eleven luxury properties spanning seven states. The Grand Bohemian Lodge Greenville boasts a variety of Native American artworks and artifacts from Kessler’s art collection and includes an art gallery with a curated collection of paintings, sculptures, and jewelry.
Grand Bohemian Lodge, 44 East Camperdown Way, (864) 520-5300. kesslercollection.com/bohemian-greenville
Photography by Jen Jefferson.
