Maria Lux
Associate Professor of Art, Chair of Art
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Fouts Center for Visual Arts 109
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509-526-4722
Maria Lux is a research-driven artist who makes installation-based works centering on the way animals are used to generate human knowledge and understanding. Originally from the Midwest, Lux earned her BFA from Iowa State University in graphic design and studio art in 2006 and her MFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She has shown work throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at Antenna in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Upfor Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is a recipient of a McMillen Foundation fellowship, and recent residencies include Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Cow House Studios in Ireland, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As a cross-disciplinary artist, Lux also regularly presents her work at academic conferences around the world—from Finland and the UK to Kentucky and Texas. She is a member of the artist-run gallery CarnationContemporary, based in Portland, Oregon.
Image Slider Descriptions
1st Image
Dominus, installation view with faux raccoons, Roomba vacuum cleaner robots, household cleaning supplies; custom-made wallpaper in Memphis style patterns; three drawings referencing social-media posts about robots and raccoons.
2nd Image
Famous Monsters comic, telling the story of three famous extinct “endlings” returned from the dead as zombies
3rd Image
Case Study, Installation at the Sheehan Gallery on campus utilizing taxidermy study skins on loan from the Whitman College Hall of Science.
4th Image
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, installation view of “Drink” showing brass chandelier with fruit-bat crystals, 17th century-Dutch-style table with Tyvek® table cloth laser-cut with diagrams of viruses and biohazard symbols, stemware with palm wine, hand-painted Delftware-style vases with plastic flowers, and a “memento mori” style painting showing foods pollinated by fruit bats with a frame showing carved diagrams of viruses spread by fruit bats.
MFA, Studio Art, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois 2012
BFA with Honors and Distinction, Art & Design; BFA, Graphic Design, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 2006
Maria Lux’s work looks at animals as important subjects in their own right, as well as what animals can tell us about human concepts of gender and family, race and class, or power and interdependence. Stemming from fields like evolutionary biology, extinction studies, ecology, history, literature, film, or epidemiology, she often explores subjects like the optimism and fantasy of empirical science, technology and domestication, the rhetoric of invasive species, or the intersection of religion, monsters and de-extinction. Though animals have only recently been taken seriously in contemporary art and scholarship, Lux’s work often uses “unserious” approaches like absurdity, humor, cuteness, horror, or wonder.
While her background is in traditional drawing and painting, Lux’s projects are typically multi-part installations, involving a variety of different forms and processes, like carving a life-sized record-breaking hog, casting fruit bats that look like chandelier crystals, and making videos of a dollhouse being flooded in an aquarium, to filming a stop-motion animation of a miniature parade, or turning a gallery into a 1960’s department store, as well as making artist books, drawings, collages, essays, and comics. She places herself within a context of both art-worlds and scholarly discussions, and sees her work as part of a larger dialogue (connecting to the field of animal studies) that investigates the unique qualities of both animals and art-making.
SELECTED RECENT SOLO AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2024 Noah’s Out-of-order Ark-cade and Reliquary, Carnation Contemporary | Portland, OR
2023 Nature is Healing, Buckham Gallery | Flint, MI
2022 As Above, So Below (with Kyle Peets), Carnation Contemporary | Portland, OR
The Art and Science of Species Revival (with Ken Rinaldo), Norman Rae Gallery, York University | York, UK
2021 Point of No Return, Antenna | New Orleans, LA
SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS AND WRITING PROJECTS
2024 “Monuments to Animal Explorers, 2019,” chapter for the German-language journal Tierstudien, issue 25, “Person and Persönlichkeit,” Ed. By Jessica Ullrich | Neofelis Verlag, Berlin, Germany
2020 “Art as a way of knowing (and not knowing) animals”, essay for Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, Vol. 2, Ed. by Margo DeMello | Columbia University Press 2021
2019 “Magnify” (images and text) | Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Issue 49: Making Nature | London, UK
SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS / INSTITUTES
2023 “MegaSkwrl: Inventing a human-sized alien flying squirrel to reflect on an uncertain future,” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Annual Conference, Arizona State University | Tempe, AZ
2021 Co-chair with Dr. Jessica Landau for “Unserious Ecocriticisms” panel, College Art Association Annual Conference | Online
2020 “Happy Endlings” (online virtual presentation with Dr. Sarah Bezan), Sex & Nature Salon | Art and Culture, University of Exeter | Exeter, UK
2019 “Asking ‘What if’ questions in artistic experimentation: Animals and risky speculations,” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference, Experimental Engagements | University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA
“Famous Monsters,” Animal Remains Conference | University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
“Animal Language Pioneers: the Possibilities and Pitfalls of Reimagining Animals as Explorers through Visual Art” Animal/Language: An interdisciplinary Conference | Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
2018 “Playing House: Visual art explorations of radical cross-species families in 1960’s science,” Finnish Society for Human-Animal Studies conference, (Un)Common Worlds | University of Turku, Turku, Finland
