One of the most recognizable artifacts of ancient Greece is the amphora, a vessel resembling a bulbous vase with two handles at the top. Used for centuries, these objects could be utilitarian and unadorned, employed to store and transport goods like wine or grain. Some were tall with bottoms that came to a point to stick into the ground. Others were thrown with high-quality clay, finished smooth, and decorated with narrative scenes of mythological tales.
Amphorae are just one kind of historic pottery type that Roberto Lugo taps into in his sculptural ceramic vessels. Along with styles like Wedgwood and Delftware, the Philadelphia-based artist and activist draws upon silhouettes that have shaped the time-honored legacy of ceramics while adding contemporary motifs like graffiti and portraits of notable Black figures.
In Lugo’s dynamic pieces, “Black figure” is a double entendre, referring both to the likenesses of trailblazing individuals like Angela Davis, Biggie Smalls, and Tyler the Creator and the terminology used to describe the paintings on 2,500-year-old Greek amphorae.
Typically separated into two stylistic applications, subjects were painted in either red-figure or black-figure styles on Greek pots. In the former, the background was filled with a slip that turned black when fired, leaving the characters red—the color of the clay. With black-figure pottery, subjects were painted with the glaze that would darken, leaving the background its natural hue.
For Lugo, the message on the surface may be different, but he continues to embrace timeless notions of resilience, memory, visual culture, and material heritage through stoneware. His sculptures are monuments to his upbringing in North Philadelphia and his love of Hip Hop culture. And their narrative scenes also unfold as commentaries on critical issues of inequality, poverty, and racial injustice.
“Prison Sequence,” for example, incorporates four primary scenes, as if from a graphic novel, to depict a man’s arrest and incarceration. Viewed in the round, there is no obvious beginning or end, suggesting an endless cycle. Below these, tableaux of other events like a child’s birthday party play out, which the protagonist is denied the ability to attend. And an untitled piece coated in reliefs of graffiti tags, depicting the busts of activists Angela Davis and Rosa Parks, nods to trailblazing figures who worked for racial justice in the 20th century.
In the U.S. prison system, Black people are jailed at five times the rate of white people. Black women are imprisoned twice as often as white women. Calling out disparities between how different races are treated, Lugo uses the power of association to challenge perception.
In “Chase (Tag)” and “Chase (Cops & Robbers),” for instance, the artist nods to childhood games that involve running after others and trying to catch them—or, in the case of Cops and Robbers, evading the “cops” in an effort to reach a kind of “jail” and free someone else. Lugo employs the low relief of Wedgwood pottery, famous for its two-tone white-on-blue style, by painting the entire scene black and drawing our attention to the much more serious issue of how Black people and people of color are unfairly targeted by law enforcement and within the justice system.
While we typically think of fine pottery as a luxury reserved for the wealthy, Lugo challenges conceptions of value by incorporating elements of graffiti, which is often viewed as vandalism and a mar on a neighborhood. Instead, it’s summoned here as an ode to urban experience and price, a contemporary backdrop highlighting individuals who have been pioneers for social justice and Lugo’s family and friends alike.
Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
