Gwen Lux

'He is the Night (Kamehameha)', fiberglass and resin sculpture by Gwen Creighton Lux, 1976, Hawaii State Art Museum

Gwen Creighton Lux (1908-2001) is among America’s pioneer women sculptors (McBrien 2004). She was born in Chicago in 1908 and studied at both the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lived and worked in Detroit, Michigan in the early part of her career, and then moved to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1973. She continued to live in Hawaii until her death in 2001.

She was married to fellow sculptor Eugene Lux. Her commissions included sculptures for Rockefeller Center in New York City, the McGraw-Hill Building in Chicago, the General Motors Technical Center in Detroit, and the centerpiece for the first class dining room of the SS United States. The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Kresge Art Museum (Michigan State University, East Lansing) and the Mariners' Museum (Newport News, Virginia) are among the public collections holding work by Gwen Creighton Lux.

Her sculptures combined abstraction and realism, and were frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She taught sculpture at the Arts & Crafts Society of Detroit.

[edit] References

• Collins, Jim L. Women Artists in America II, Chattanooga, Tenn., Collins, 1975.
• Heller, Jules and Nancy G. Heller, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, New York, Garland, 1995.
• McBrien, Judith Paine, Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, 39.
• Roussel, Christine, The Guide to the Art of Rockefeller Center, New York, W.W. Norton, 2006.
• Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions, Boston, G.K. Hall, 1990.