Linda Lighton Artist Talk & Opening Reception

Learn more about Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025

two sculptures by artist Linda Lighton

Left: Linda Lighton, Nude Descending a Staircase, 2007, glazed earthenware with china paint and luster, 18 x 11 ½ x 5 ½ in. Collection Shook, Hardy, & Bacon L.L.P. Right: Linda Lighton, Tinkerbelle, 2007, glazed earthenware with china paint and luster, 14 ½ x 13 x 12 in. Courtesy the Artist

Join us for an artist talk with Linda Lighton on December 12, 2025, 6-7 p.m., Hudson Auditorium, celebrating the opening of the Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025. A reception in the Museum’s atrium will follow the talk.

For fifty years, American artist Linda Lighton (b. 1948) has created a powerful body of subversive ceramic sculptures that explore desire in all its complex forms. Her work uses wit and seduction as conceptual weaponry to mine the relationships between sex, power, and politics.

Born into an affluent Midwestern family, Lighton could have taken the straightforward route and followed her father’s ambitions for her to marry well and become a housewife—a continuation of social ideals from an earlier generation. Instead, Lighton rejected this trajectory, insisting on her own desire to become an artist. When this was met with refusal, she left home, helped publish a leftist newspaper, got married, had a child, joined a commune on a Native American reservation in Washington State, where she lived without running water or electricity, and built an eight-sided log cabin by hand—all before the age of 25.

Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025 will be on view in the Nerman Museum’s Oppenheimer, Thompson and Anonymous Galleries, First Floor, December 13, 2025 through May 3, 2026.