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

Art and activism: the subversive ceramic sculptures of Linda Lighton.

For fifty years, American artist Linda Lighton 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 relationship between sex, power, and politics.

Linda Lighton: Love and War is a richly illustrated monograph that gives a comprehensive overview of Linda Lighton’s pioneering career. The book delves into the ways that her highly original and often rebellious work pushes the boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

Accompanied by new scholarship on the artist’s practice, this publication situates her sculptures--which use a feminist visual language to address social issues, such as gun violence, environmental degradation, and gender conformity--within the context of broader art historical developments.

Sydney Stutterheim is an art historian, curator, and writer whose research focuses on postwar and contemporary art. In addition to serving as lead curator for Linda Lighton: Love and War at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, she is the author of Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s and coeditor of Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden, among other publications. Rose Dergan is director of research for Gagosian worldwide. She is coeditor of the monographs John Currin, Cecily Brown, and Richard Prince: American Prayer. Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer, and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been director of the Museum of Arts and Design and head of research at the V&A. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft, The Craft Reader, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (with Jane Pavitt), The Invention of Craft, Art in the Making (with Julia Bryan-Wilson), Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects, Objects: USA 2020, Craft: An American History, and A Century of Tomorrows. JoAnne Northrup is executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. She was previously curatorial director and curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art and chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art. Zoë Lescaze is a writer based in New York, where she covers art and science for The New York Times and other publications. She is the author of Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past. Sara Morris is the Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics at the Crocker Art Museum and is a PhD candidate in art history with a focus on feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.