Helen Gilbert (artist)

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Helen Gilbert (1922 – April 8, 2002) was an American artist and art educator born at Mare Island, California. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Mills College and then moved to Honolulu, where she married physician Fred Gilbert. In 1968 she received an MFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and taught there for about 30 years. She married artist Kenneth Wayne Bushnell in 1995 and also worked as a visiting professor at Parsons The New School for Design and the Pratt Institute. She died at home on April 8, 2002.

Gilbert painted Hawaii’s landscapes and people, but she is best known for pioneering the use of polarized light in kinetic sculpture. Licomos, a 1970 work in the Honolulu Museum of Art, shows colors that shift as it moves behind Plexiglass. Her art is held in many major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate, and the British Museum.