Maria Lux

Maria Lux is a research-driven artist who makes installation-based works centering on animals and their relationship to human knowledge. Her work is situated at the intersection of art and scholarship, and she draws from fields such as the natural sciences, history, literature, and film.

Originally from Iowa, Maria earned her BFA from Iowa State University in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. Solo exhibitions include Upfor Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Visual Arts Exchange Cube Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina; and VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. She has been an artist in residence numerous times, including at the Enos Park Residency in Springfield, Illinois, and the Center for New Art at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. She is currently an assistant professor of art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Maria received 2018 GAP Award funding for a new installation project that uses the aesthetics of horror-punk to reconsider the romanticized, sentimental figure of the “endling” (the last remaining individual of a nearly-extinct species) through a graphic novel and sculptural creatures rising as zombies from their natural-history-museum graves.