Ceramicist Roberto Lugo shared his work and his best advice with students who dropped by his residency at the Office for the Arts last week.
“I really want to demystify that idea that art is only for people who have those gifts or people who have historically had access to it,” Lugo said in an interview. “For me, art is for everyone. One of the most satisfying parts about art is seeing someone figure out something that they offer that they didn’t think they did.”
The Puerto Rican artist, activist, and educator, whose pots can be found in a growing number of museum collections, worked with more than a dozen undergraduates — most of them women of color — over two days of campus workshops. Each visitor was offered a chance to work on cups or tiles, with Lugo providing generous coaching on everything from perfecting patterns to painting over gray clay. He even opened up about his Philadelphia upbringing and the inspiration he draws from hip-hop.
“During each workshop with undergraduates, Roberto inspired students to think about their lives and cultural backgrounds as a starting point and an indicator of what makes them unique,” observed Kathy King, director of the Ceramics Program and Visual Arts Initiatives at the OFA. “He then asked them to think about the words that came to mind, creating a visual vocabulary to decorate both cups and tiles with florals, text, and colorful patterns, among other things.”
Institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have acquired Lugo’s work in recent years. Tiffany Onyeiwu ’25, who has a concentration in film and visual studies, is a frequent visitor to these spaces and was excited to meet the artist behind some of her favorite pieces.
“It’s been really inspiring to see an artist who has such a significant part of themselves embedded in their work,” said Onyeiwu, who attended both of the workshops Lugo offered. “Contemporary ceramics is becoming more prevalent in American culture, which is something that I’m excited and grateful for.”
Lugo also engaged with the community during a packed public lecture Monday evening at Harvard’s Ed Portal in Allston.
The event opened with performances by Salome Agbaroji ’27 and Elyse Martin-Smith ’25, social studies concentrators who delivered rhymes loaded with clever pottery references. Martin-Smith commemorated the 19th-century work of David Drake, a Black potter who produced a body of vessels while enslaved in South Carolina. Agbaroji, the 2023 National Youth Poet Laureate, captured attention with witty lyrics that cautioned listeners to “just stay out of the kiln” if they can’t “take the heat.”
“I was trying to write something that was very accessible and engaging to honor what pottery is and also honor the hip-hop culture that is so heavily infused in Roberto Lugo’s work,” said Agbaroji.
Lugo’s presentation covered some of his most popular artwork as well as the people, music, and life events that affected his creative process. While most of Lugo’s art takes inspiration from European and Asian ceramic practices, he is also deeply influenced by Mexican and Peruvian ceramics as well as the textile traditions of Indigenous communities of the Americas.
“One of the specific things that is a challenge for me is that a lot of those communities are still struggling for representation of their own culture,” he said. “Even though I’m inspired by it and some of my work is influenced by it, I quite often stick to formats that are in many ways tropes or familiar visual elements from ceramics history. I try to be very thoughtful with where I borrow from, because I don’t want to replace a culture.”
Another of Lugo’s trademarks is pottery that incorporates portraits, from historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. to influential musicians like Biggie Smalls and Erykah Badu. Lugo linked his penchant for portraiture to growing up amid Philadelphia’s great mural scene, with walls featuring people of color.
“Since I didn’t have any art history in school, that was really my perception of what art was,” Lugo said.
More recent works mix traditional methods with broader representative narratives. His “Orange and Black” series, for example, plays on ancient Greek glazed terracotta with modern depictions of city life.
Back at the Ceramics Program studio, Lugo shared a testament of the connective powers of artwork. “As an artist, there’s many different ways to engage with people outside of your own body,” he said. “One of them is through the physical artwork itself. There’s the display of the artwork and how it interacts and engages with people. There’s the educational facet to it, which is giving people the autonomy to make their own artwork. And then there’s the conversations that get created through both education and art-making. For me, that’s where the magic happens.”
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