Roberto Lugo

Roberto Lugo creates defiant genre-mixing works that confront the function and subject matter of high art objects from Classical Antiquity, East Asia, the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth-century Europe, and beyond. Using the ancient medium of clay as his canvas, Lugo draws attention to intergenerational experiences of racial injustice while honoring African American and Latino culture.

Ceramics hold particular significance for Lugo due to their deep anthropological context. Over the course of history, finely-crafted ceramic objects stood as a symbol of class, privilege, and the aristocracy. Lugo intervenes in these histories, and countless more, to create a new mode of storytelling that blends narrative and portraiture with cross-disciplinary techniques and time-honored forms in order to introduce those notably absent from the art historical canon. The result is distinctive works in clay unified by Lugo’s call for representation.

Roberto Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pew Fellowship, the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, a US Artists Award, and, most recently, the Heinz Award for the Arts. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; High Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Walters Art Museum; and more.

Presented with support from the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.

This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.