SEPTA Train Serving Bowl

Roberto Lugo, artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator, was born to working-class Puerto Rican parents. As a teenager, his first artistic expressions appeared in the form of graffiti tags on abandoned buildings in his neighborhood of Kensington, Philadelphia. After taking drawing classes at community college, he discovered pottery and found his niche working with clay. As Lugo would later describe, ceramics saved his life.

In his work, Lugo uses vivid glazes to apply surface decoration onto ceramic forms, drawing upon visual sources as wide ranging as graffiti tags and Chinese ceramic patterns, and clay bodies that take their cues from forms such as Ancient Greek kraters or nineteenth-century monumental vases. Lugo’s defiant genre-blending pulls from a deep history of ceramics and confronts the institutional precedents set by the histories of collecting works from Classical Antiquity, East Asia, or the Italian Renaissance. With these personal riffs, the artist draws attention to intergenerational experiences of social and racial injustice, while also celebrating his personal roots within Latino and African American culture.