Lucia Stern was largely self-taught as a painter and sculptor; her formal training was in music and literature. Stern studied at the Milwaukee Conservatory, UW-Milwaukee and Columbia University from 1918-1922. Stern served on the board of the Milwaukee Art Institute from 1933 and became a trustee in 1967 when it was the Milwaukee Art Center. She didn't begin to work regularly as an artist until 1935.  She became a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1942, continuing in that capacity for the next forty years. Stern was instrumental in beginning the “Touch the Great” and “Women in the Arts” lecture series at the Milwaukee Art Center. Her characteristic approach in painting, lecturing and writing was to borrow styles or quotes from her contemporaries and modify them.  

Throughout the more than five decades during which she was active, she utilized drawing, painting, sculpting, and decoupage (cut and stitched or glued fabric). She was also an early experimenter with unusual, re-arrangable, sometimes hanging, 3D compositions using cork, plastic, glass, metal foil, cellophane, lucite and driftwood; and, created stuffed sculptures that could double as toys for children and adults. In the 1960s-1970s she began integrating architecture and projected color-light with music and human voice.