When Roberto Lugo was a child growing up in the slums of Kensington in Philadelphia, summers were hot and dirty. Luckily for Lugo, his father had a monkey wrench. Elder Lugo was that my father, who could turn on the fire extinguisher to cool things and clean things when it was hot and there was no water.
“We got really popular in our neighborhood because of that,” Lugo told the Observer on a sunny spring day in New York’s Madison Square Park. On nights when the water was shut off, he and his father bathed in the water pipe late, just the two of them sharing the blue Irish Spring soap. Years later, when Roberto began to love ceramics, those memories came to light. “The first thing I did was put out soap for a fire extinguisher, and that started me down this path of, yes, art can tell a story. And it becomes my greatest strength, right? It becomes something that makes me different.”
In the years since he fashioned that first ceramic hydrant, Lugo’s enormous influence has landed him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Walters Art Museum, among others, and his ceramics consistently fetch five figures at auction. For all his success, however, Lugo has not forgotten his roots in Kensington and that night bathed in street light from a fire hydrant.
Today, a memorial version of that sprinkler—15 feet tall, orange and marked with graffiti—stands in Madison Square Park. It is the centerpiece of “Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Potter of the Village),” commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy and the largest public exhibition of Lugo’s work to date. Nearby, Lugo added a 20-foot urn, hand-painted with images of Puerto Rican lanterns. Among them, Lugo placed four hand-painted domino tables around the park’s pool—BYOD, as MSPC curator Denise Markonish put it—along with tire planters that Lugo painted and filled with native Puerto Rican plants selected by the park’s horticulture team.
Lugo was born in 1981 in Kensington, the third child of Gelberto and Maribel Lugo, part of the first generation in their family to leave Puerto Rico for the U.S. His first exposure to art came when he took a can of spray paint and joined his cousins’ graffiti crew, not for art but for protection.
“I was really scared for my life, to be honest,” he said. “Everyone described me as a scared child. I knew I grew up in a difficult environment and I didn’t want to fight. So I lived with my cousins and they were all cartoonists. To have this protection, I was always around them, and then I started doing it, and I was good.” He signed everything ‘Robske’—a tag he still puts on every piece he makes, including a giant orange pipe that now stands in one of Manhattan’s most trafficked public parks.
Through graffiti he learned more than swinging tags and evading the police. “Graffiti, for me, was important. I put my name on a train, or a place where people can see it, so I have a story.” The transition to clay was, in part, a request for permanence. “It takes thousands of years. I’m using this method that’s been used to tell us about culture throughout history. And in many ways, I’m presenting my culture in a way that I know will outlast my years.”
After high school, with factory jobs and drug dealing in his sights, he moved from Philadelphia to Florida where he enrolled in a community college, took painting classes and fell in love with ceramics. He bought a tire and a cage on Craigslist, put it in his parents’ kitchen, fired a worker by removing their stove and used a horse in the same place and sold the pots on eBay for $15. That eBay job was good enough to earn him a scholarship to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. He earned a BFA, then an MFA from Pennsylvania State University.
Her big gallery break came after winning an emerging artist award from the National Council of Ceramics Education in 2015. When the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia came calling, he arrived carrying his work in orange Home Depot buckets. “They said, ‘What are your tea pots?’ And I said, ‘$35.’ They were like, ‘We’re not going to show a job that sells for $35. It will be considered art. It’s going to have to be at least $1,000, $2,000 for the tea pots.’” The same tea pots that wouldn’t have sold for a few dollars at the Pittsburgh craft fair a few weeks ago sold for thousands.
In 2019, Lugo became the first ceramicist to win the Rome Prize, a prestigious award given annually by the American Academy in Rome. In 2023, he received the Heinz Prize, which came with $250,000 in unrestricted funds. With his work in major museums and gallery sales, it seems Lugo has little else to prove, but he was there in Madison Square Park doing just that.
“It’s America’s 250th year and they’re giving the Puerto Rican the power to choose what goes in here, and I’m choosing a lot of Puerto Ricans,” he said of the people he chose to draw on the machine. “It’s not just Roberto Clemente—my mom, who took one class at a time since I was in middle school to become a nurse. Then there’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, [Supreme Court Justice Sonia] Sotomayor, all these people have done great things.” Her mother’s reaction to seeing her face in a 20-foot statue in Manhattan was immediate and completely her own. “You’re the same, that picture makes me look old. He’s the type of person that whenever he meets someone new, he wants to go get his eyebrows done.” He paused before adding: “It’s interesting how people see their image.”
The tunnel has a tunnel running through it—it’s wide enough to walk through, its interior walls painted in blue and white graffiti. It offers an invitation to step inside the ship and be a part of it. “People will pass by here and hopefully they will see something that they see, and for a while, maybe they come out of that invisibility, and they feel that their life is important and what they do every day. And that reminder, I think, is really at the heart of what I’m trying to do.”
As for the hydrant, Lugo does not take the job seriously, despite its large place in his personal history. “At the end of the day, I really think when people walk away from this thing, they’re not going to think of that Roberto Lugo piece like Claes Oldenburg. They’re going to think, ‘Hey, remember that firefighter? Wasn’t that funny?’ And for me that is very important.”
Madison Square Park is no accident site for this kind of thinking. The conservancy has operated its public art program for more than 20 years and was the first public art organization to commission the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2019. “Alfarero del Barrio” was originally owned by Brooke Kamin Rapoport, former curator of MSPC, and was promoted by her successor Markonish.
“This is a huge platform for an artist like him,” Markonish told the Observer, adding that Madison Square Park draws more than 60,000 visitors every day. “While Alfarero del Barrio nods to his ceramic work, the exhibition expands his vision, marking an important turning point in his artistic approach.”
A fire extinguisher is installed in a grassy area near the park’s 25th Street entrance. The sculpture was made at the Johnson Atelier in Hamilton, New Jersey, using thick CNC foam blocks, assembled like a puzzle and coated with a waterproof shellac resin, which would have helped if Lugo had been given his way in placing the hydrant sculpture. He wanted to put it in the dog run in the park.
“Alfarero del Barrio” will be exhibited in the park until December 6.
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