Philly-born pottery artist Roberto Lugo has a new show of ‘Greek vases’ at Princeton

A few months after Philadelphia ceramics artist Roberto Lugo graduated with a master’s of fine arts from Penn State, he set out to drive to Florida to visit family for Christmas. In Macon, Ga., four police cars began following him on the highway, circling around him for a while.

It wasn’t long before they pulled him over and ordered him to the ground.

He was told to wait until a drug-sniffing dog was called to search his van. As he lay there, Lugo was scared. It was December 2014. Four months before this, Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, had been shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

“I kept thinking, ‘If I make a wrong move, or if I say the wrong thing, my life can be taken from me,’” Lugo recalled. “I wondered if I was going to wind up like Mike Brown.”

Lugo was 31 at the time. He thinks he was stopped because police saw an Afro-Latino Puerto Rican man, and thought he was a criminal.

“At any moment, your life can be taken from you, just because of how you look.”

Lugo had grown up in poverty in Kensington. In speeches, he tells audiences his neighborhood was called “The Badlands.” But “ghetto,” to him, means “resourceful.” And creative. “People who can make a lot of stuff from very little,” he said. In one of his street-side pottery demonstrations, he made a pottery wheel from a tire axle placed atop a tree stump.

Lugo graduated with his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2012. It was at the Missouri school that Lugo began putting portraits of himself, his family, and other Black and Latino faces on his pottery. It was to make a statement that he deserved to belong in art spaces.

In Kansas City, Lugo said, he was constantly stopped by people — other students and faculty members, usually white — wanting him to show his student ID. Once, after a teacher asked to see his ID, the teacher continued to quiz Lugo. “He wanted me to tell him the names of my professors to prove I really was a student.”

Another time, Lugo was walking into a building behind another student who managed to use his body to block Lugo from entering.

“I had to press my student ID against the glass so he could see I had the right to be there,” he said.

That day in Georgia, as he lay next to his parents’ van, Lugo had no way of seeing what was in store for him. Would he have a future?

Could he imagine that, in a few years, his pottery would be seen in some of the most prestigious museums in the country: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others? Could he have known that he would go on to teach pottery in an artist residency at Harvard, or that he would one day win the Rome Prize in 2019-20 and the Heinz Award in 2023?

In February, a new exhibition called Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black opened at Art@Bainbridge, a gallery project of the Princeton University Art Museum. It will remain through July 6. Admission is free.

Lugo, now 43 and living in Montgomery County, said he never had any formal art classes in all his years in Philadelphia public schools. The only art he knew about were the towering murals of Black heroes on city walls. His first artwork was the graffiti he spray-painted in middle school.

Until recently, Lugo had been an assistant professor of ceramics at Temple’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Now, he volunteers to teach at schools like Julia de Burgos and Willard Elementary in Kensington. He once set up a potter’s wheel on a vacant lot to show people how they can make art too. “I put my hands on their hands,” he told The Inquirer.

Today, Lugo describes himself as an artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator. He is a frequent speaker at art education conferences, and he’s spoken at the Smithsonian. He usually starts his talks with a poem, an outgrowth of his love of hip-hop. This month, he will give a keynote speech at the National Art Education Association Convention in Louisville, Ky., which says it is the largest gathering of visual art education professionals in the world.

Five years after the police dog scoured through his van, Lugo, in 2019, created a 5-foot-tall vessel, designed with both ancient Greek and Chinese motifs. He placed a portrait of Michael Brown in his high school graduation cap on one side.

On the other side, Lugo painted a portrait of himself, in his own high school graduation photo. Both young men have the same rounded, full-cheeked face.

The title of the artwork is: Do you know how hard it is to get a black man through high school? It’s taken from a quote from Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, after her son was killed.

Much of Lugo’s pottery uses the centuries-old porcelain and clay traditions from Europe and Asia. The European pottery was often used to depict royalty.

Lugo upends all these historical narratives and places people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth on his pots. He often pairs Black or Latino historical figures with rappers like Notorious B.I.G. or Tupac Shakur. He takes a traditional “royal” style of pottery making, then mixes in dashes of hip-hop culture and graffiti.

“These are stories worthy of being documented in a format that can last thousands of years,” he said.

Lugo began making pottery that evoked ancient Greek forms years ago, long before the Princeton museum called to suggest he sort through its collection of 2,500-year-old Greek pottery.

His works are being shown next to Greek pots dating to the fifth century BCE. The vases from antiquity are displayed behind glass barriers.

While an ancient Greek vase might show young men walking through the town after a night of revelry and drinking, one of Lugo’s “Greek-like” pots shows a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to an all-white school behind a line of marshals or a civil rights march.

The ancient Greek vases might show Greek men in sporting events while one of Lugo’s vases shows Philly men playing basketball. They also show men interacting with police: One officer is shown in riot gear, another leads a man away in handcuffs.

One Lugo vase shows baseball great Roberto Clemente working in a sugarcane field as a child in Puerto Rico. Another captures Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, who was murdered in 1995.

Carolyn M. Laferrière, associate curator of ancient Mediterranean art at the Princeton University Art Museum, curated Lugo’s exhibition.

“What’s exciting about his work is he’s creatively adapting and playing with these motifs with the archaic and classical tropes in Greek ceramics, but using and adapting them to tell his own story in modern-day America,” she said.

“He’s showing how [this ancient medium] can be used to tell stories of people who are otherwise underrepresented.”