Gwen Lux

Gwen Lux

The controversial Eve at Radio City Music Hall

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

Gwen Lux Creighton (professionally Gwen Lux, 1908–1987) was among America’s pioneer women sculptors (McBrien 2004).

Lux was born in Chicago in 1908 and began her art studies in Detroit at age 14, taking classes with Mary Chase Perry Stratton at Pewabic Pottery.^[1] She later studied at both the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1933 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lux 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 1987.^[2]

Her first marriage was to fellow sculptor Eugene Lux, and in 1959 she married Thomas Creighton, longtime editor of Progressive Architecture magazine. In 1986 Lux remarried, to her longtime friend and companion Jerome R. Wallace, a well-known artist who created batiks using natural dyes found in the local environment on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

Her commissions included sculptures for Radio City Music Hall 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 her work.

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.

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.
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Footnotes

1. Barrie, Bentley, Helms and Rospond, ‘’Artists in Michigan, 1900-1976: A biographical dictionary’’, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, 1989
2. Gwen Creighton Lux on AskArt.com