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, guest curated by Sydney Stutterheim, PhD, with curatorial assistance from Rose Dergan. 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 her commitment to continuing the conversation around 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.

Linda Lighton lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. She has exhibited her ceramic sculptures nationally and internationally since 1979. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, KC, MO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, KC, MO; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kansas City Museum, KC, KS; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA; Icheon World Ceramics Center, Icheon, Korea; FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum, the American Museum, Fuping, China; International Ceramic Museum, Kecskemet, Hungary; Latvian National Museum, Riga, Latvia; Jiesia Bone China Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Ariana Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; and the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva, Switzerland, among others.