LUCIA EAMES
Artist and designer Lucia Eames was born in St. Louis in 1930. The only child of Charles Eames and his first wife Catherine Woermann, Eames spent her childhood in St. Louis and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where her father led the industrial design program. She was also close with her stepmother Ray Eames, a painter and designer who married Charles in 1941. She enrolled first at Vassar College, where she studied for two years before completing her studies at Radcliffe College in 1952. At Radcliffe she studied under Walter Gropius, though she recalled it as a time when women were “dissuaded from studying architecture at Harvard.”
After finishing her education Eames lived first in Massachusetts where she had three children with her first husband, Byron Atwood; they later divorced. She met her second husband, Aristedes Demetrios, studying sculpture. After the couple married in 1961 they moved to San Francisco and had two children, Eames and Llisa.
Lucia Eames’ formal design career began in earnest in the 1960s. While her work spanned media, from photographs and writing to found objects and large scale commissions, it is her metal work in cut steel and bronze and her graphic designs for which she is best remembered. She gravitated towards abstract representations and vernacular symbols, from hearts to sunbursts, doves, comets, and butterflies, among many other glyphs she employed. “Seeing with the Heart,” a simple metal form, is one of her best known pieces. Her works were exhibited around the country at ArtPrize, the Landscape Garden Show, Ma(i)sonry and in other public and private collections, and many are still on display in the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California.
In addition to her graphic design and sculpture, Eames dedicated herself to preserving the legacy of her father and stepmother. She gifted materials from the Eames Archive to the Library of Congress, and in 2004 created the Eames Foundation to steward the Eames House and ensure the longevity of her parents’ work. Later in her life, Eames worked and lived in Sonoma County, creating a significant archive. She died in 2014.
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