Education
In 1968, she received an Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and then remained on the faculty for 30 years.
In 1968, she received an Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and then remained on the faculty for 30 years.
She earned a baccalaureate in art at Mills College, in California. Her second marriage was to fellow artist Kenneth Wayne Bushnell in 1995. She had also been a visiting professor at Parsons The New School for Design and the Pratt Institute.
She died at home of cancer on April 8, 2002.
Although she painted the land and people of Hawaii with brush and palette knife, her fame rests upon her pioneering use of polarized light in kinetic sculpture. Licomos, a kinetic sculpture from 1970, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an example.
The colors change as they move around in a circle behind stationary Plexiglass. The Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Tate Gallery (London), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) are among the public collections holding works by Helen Gilbert.