Kansas City champion of the Arts, Linda Lighton, seen here with NCECA onsite liaison, Amy Duke, organized this international exhibition

…37 artists,

………22 countries,

………………..6 continents

The Lighton International Artists Exchange Program presents…

“Desire“

We live for desire. It is our life force. It is the future.
Desire pushes us forward. It is brightly pigmented and bound by the earth.
Desire is the energy of evolution; urging, wanting, striving and competing. It dazzles us.  The hormonal body desires physical exchange and procreation. We want to survive and are genetically inclined towards legacy, no matter how mundane. We are seduced by fame, power, money and sex.
Desire is full of the craving for color; purple, apricot, the gold of money, the slippery crimson of guts and ripped flesh, pulsing inside your aching body.
Desire smells of amber, iron, musk, warm flesh and cold steel and money. Desire tastes of pomegranate; tart and juicy, or honeydew melon, soft and ripe.
Desire is cold gold, or soft and warm thighs with liquid kisses sliding over throbbing and sweating bodies. Desire is cashmere blankets and soft whispers on your neck.
Desire sounds like a hot convertible on a summer night. It sounds like combustion, the flooring of a car engine, and slow music, jazz or classical, and sighs, cries and lies.
Desire is an effort to know life fully, to roll in the dirt, slide in the mud and lie on your pillow dabbed with tea rose. It is a portal to passion that can feel like a sin or a prayer.

-Linda Lighton

“Desire is the variable wind which blows zephyr-like, now shrill, filling our sails

for some far off port, flapping them idly upon the high seas in sunny weather, scudding us now here, now there, before it’s terrific breadth, speeding us anon to accomplishment; as often tending our sails and leaving us battered and dismantled, a picturesque wreck in some forgotten harbor.”

-Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie