Maria Lux
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. She earned her BFA from Iowa State University in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. She has shown work throughout the United States, including solo shows at Antenna Project in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the former Upfor Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is a recipient of a McMillen Foundation fellowship, and 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, and in more traditional academic formats ranging from a special issue of the journal Social Work in Mental Health, to the German-language Animal Studies journal Tierstudien, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature and Visual Culture. Lux also co-edited the book Unserious Ecocriticism: Humor, Play & Environmental Destruction in Art & Visual Culture (with Jessica Landau). Originally from the Midwest, she is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and is a member of the artist-run gallery Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR.
GVSU Appearances
Maria Lux Exhibition Reception & Meet the Artist
Thursday, September 17, 2026, 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Padnos Student Gallery, Calder Art Center, Valley Campus
Please join us for an exhibition by the GVSU Arts Celebration Visiting Artist Maria Lux. Maria and GVSU students from the Department of Visual and Media Arts created and installed the art exhibition which will remain on view until October 9, 2026, during open hours. Free and open to the public.
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry by Maria Lux
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry by Maria Lux
Art as a Way of Knowing (and not knowing) Animals: An Artist Talk by Maria Lux
Friday, September 18, 2026, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Grand River Room, Kirkhof Center, Valley Campus
A free luncheon with the artist will follow the presentation. Registration is required.
Always focused on animals, Maria Lux’s research-based artworks take on serious topics, often through an ‘unserious’ approach like absurdity, humor, playfulness, cuteness, darkness, horror, or narrative. Broadly, Maria’s work joins that of other research-driven artists in arguing for art as an important form of research itself, generating new knowledge through creative practice. In this lecture, learn how Maria approaches making her artwork about animals from a research-based lens.
Animals & Art: Panel Discussion
Friday, September 18, 2026, 2:00 - 3:00 pm
Pew Library Multipurpose Room, Valley Campus
Join Maria Lux in conversation with local and regional experts who also work at the intersection of animals and art. This conversation will be facilitated by a current student from the Department of Visual and Media Arts.
Case Study by Maria Lux
Artist Statement
As a research-driven artist, I make projects that extend, complicate, or join-in conversations taking place across disciplines about animals and the way we use them to know our world and ourselves. Looking to fields such as evolutionary biology, extinction studies, ecology, history, literature, film, cultural geography, or science and technology studies, I make multi-piece installations utilizing a variety of different forms and processes, from carving a life-sized record-breaking hog, casting fruit bats that look like chandelier crystals, or making videos of a dollhouse being flooded in an aquarium, to filming a stop-motion animation of a miniature parade, or sewing a human-sized flying squirrel outfit and making a bigfoot video in the woods. The installations often reference other sites (from a 1960’s department store to natural history museum displays). This flexible format reflects cross-disciplinary work in general, in which conflicting views and multiple perspectives and methods aim to create a larger visual argument within the space.
Though the topics in my work are often quite serious, my work uses “unserious” approaches, like absurdity, humor, playfulness, cuteness, darkness, horror, or narrative. Racoons riding Roombas around the gallery, a comic about zombie “endlings” returned from the dead attacking people in an outdoor recreation store, collages of weird robot dogs, casts of dead mice parachuting from the sky, or a parade float of sheep wearing life-vests all seek alternative ways to think and know. More broadly, my work joins that of other research-driven artists in arguing for art as an important form of research itself, generating new knowledge through creative practice.