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

Join us for a book signing with the artist!

a crowd of people browse the Santa Fe Native American Art Market

Join us for a book signing and reception with the artist on September 17, 2025, 5-8 p.m., celebrating the launch of Linda Lighton: Love & War, A Fifty-Year Survey, 1975-2025, a 208-page book, published and internationally distributed by Hirmer. Attendees will be able to purchase their own copy of the book, priced at $50. This richly illustrated monograph gives a comprehensive overview of her pioneering body of work, which pushes the boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

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.

This monograph accompanies an exhibition by the same name. Linda Lighton: Love & War will be on view from December 13, 2025 through May 3, 2026, in the Oppenheimer, Thompson, and Anonymous Galleries on the first floor of the Nerman Museum.

Book sponsors:

  • Jeffrey D. Byrne
  • Scott Francis, Francis Family Foundation
  • Dennis and Carol Hudson Family Foundation
  • R.C. Kemper, Jr. Charitable Trust and Foundation

Cover image:

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