Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025

On view Dec. 13, 2025 through May 3, 2026

two sculptures by 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

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.

The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Linda Lighton: Love & War, a major retrospective exhibition that examines the arc of Lighton’s career. It is accompanied by a 208-page book, published and internationally distributed by Hirmer. This richly illustrated monograph gives a comprehensive overview of her pioneering body of work, which pushes the boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

As a Kansas City native, Lighton offers a perspective on the American cultural landscape from the country’s center—an important distinction from the predominantly coastal focus in art discourses. Her work addresses universal experiences, yet her life story tells a unique narrative of rebellion and activism. Particularly, Lighton challenges long-standing expectations for women, exploring gender inequality concerns alongside strident critiques of gun violence and environmental degradation. As the first-ever major museum survey of her work, Love & War highlights this singular artist’s continued insistence on the joyousness of life amidst social and political struggles.

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.