Roberto Lugo
KEEPERS
© Roberto Lugo.
In a 2021 interview for the New York Times, Roberto Lugo noted, “When I first started making ceramics, if any- body ever gave me a compliment, my joke was always ‘Oh, you can go check out my work at the Met.’”1 Since then, the artist has appeared in numer- ous exhibitions, but perhaps none more important than Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where twenty-six of his works are on view in a room that celebrates a nonlinear storytelling tradition wed- ded in historical events, fantasy, and science fiction. Having the doors to one of the world’s greatest museums open wide for him has liberated Lugo, and he is now telling personal stories in his work. His ongoing Orange and Black series, inspired by ancient Greek vessels, contains painful accounts of his brother’s incarceration and his childhood encounters with racism.
In his first solo show at R & Company, in 2023, Lugo constructed the Pigeon Crib, an homage to James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room, featuring vessels with an encyclopedic fusion of patterns drawn from decorative arts history, from Rookwood tiles to Coogi sweaters. These works departed from Lugo’s portraiture and narrative focus, focusing instead on iconography that represents both his family’s agrar- ian past in Puerto Rico and his community in Philadelphia.
B. 1981, Philadelphia, PA
Lives and works in Wyncote, PA
SM9501
Roberto Lugo, A Century of Education (Century Vase), 2024. Glazed stoneware, luster, and enamel. Photo by R & Company.