When Roberto Lugo was a kid growing up in Philadelphia’s gritty Kensington neighborhood, summers were hot and dirty. Fortunately for Lugo, his father had a monkey wrench. Lugo was the eldest Which My dad, the one who knew how to turn on a fire hydrant to cool things off and clean things up when the heat was on and the water was out.
“We became really popular in my neighborhood because of it,” Lugo told the Observer on a sunny spring day in New York’s Madison Square Park. On nights when the water was out, he and his father would take late baths on the tap, sharing only a bright green bar of Irish spring soap. Years later, when Roberto’s budding passion for ceramics captured those memories, they came to the fore. “The first thing I made was a soap dispenser for a fire hydrant, and that kind of pushed me down this path of like, oh yeah, art can tell a story. And it kind of becomes my superpower, right? It becomes something that makes me stand out.”
In the years since designing his first ceramic faucet, Lugo’s superhuman strength has landed him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Walters Art Museum, among others, and his ceramic works regularly fetch five figures at auction. For all his success, Lugo has never forgotten his roots in Kensington and those nights he would bathe by the streetlight in the cool spray of a fire hydrant.
Today, a massive version of that hydrant — 15 feet tall, orange and marked with graffiti — sits in Madison Square Park. It is the centerpiece of “Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Potter’s 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-tall urn, hand-painted with images of Puerto Rican stars. Between them, Lugo placed four hand-painted domino tables around the garden’s reflecting pool — BYOD, said MSPC Curator Dennis Markonish — and tire planters painted by Lugo and filled with native Puerto Rican plants selected by the garden’s horticultural team.
Lugo was born in 1981 in Kensington, London, the third child of Gilberto and Maribel Lugo, part of the first generation of their family to leave Puerto Rico for the United States mainland. His first exposure to art came when he picked up a can of spray paint and joined his cousins’ graffiti crew, not for the art but for protection.
“To be honest, I was really afraid for my life,” he said. “Everyone called me a scaredy kid. I knew I grew up in a tough place and I didn’t want to fight. So I would hang out with my cousins and they were all graffiti writers. So to have that protection, I would always hang around them, and then I started doing it, and I was pretty good.” He signed everything “Robske”—a mark he still places on every piece he makes, including the giant orange tap that now sits in one of Manhattan’s busiest public parks.
Through graffiti, he learned more than just how to tag up and elude the cops. “Graffiti, for me, was about being important. I put my name on a train, or somewhere people could see it, so I could be important.” The shift to clay was, in part, a call for continuity. “It goes on for thousands of years. I’m using this medium that has been used to tell us about cultures throughout history. In many ways, I’m putting my culture in a form that I know will far exceed my years.”
After high school, with factory jobs behind him and the drug trade overtaking his peripheral vision, he left Philadelphia for Florida where he attended community college, took art classes and fell in love with ceramics. He bought a wheel and oven on Craigslist, set up in his parents’ kitchen, split the work by unplugging the stove and running the oven from the same outlet and sold the pots on eBay for $15. This work on eBay was good enough to win him a scholarship to study at the Kansas City Art Institute. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Pennsylvania State University.
His big break at the gallery came after winning an emerging artist award from the National Council for Ceramic Arts Education in 2015. When the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia called, he arrived carrying his works in orange buckets from Home Depot. “They said, ‘How much are your teapots?’ So I said: $35. And they were saying, “We can’t show work that sells for $35.” It will be seen as art. “Teapots should be priced at least $1,000 or $2,000.” The same teapots he couldn’t sell for a few dollars at a craft fair in Pittsburgh weeks ago sold out by the thousands.
In 2019, Lugo became the first ceramic artist to win the Rome Prize, a prestigious award given annually by the American Academy in Rome. In 2023, he received the Heinz Award, which came with $250,000 in unrestricted funds. With his works in major museums and selling out at galleries, it seemed like Lugo didn’t have much to prove, but he was doing just that in Madison Square Park.
“It’s the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, and they’re giving Puerto Ricans the autonomy to choose what happens here, and I’m choosing a group of Puerto Ricans,” he said of the people he chose to depict on the jar. “It’s not just Roberto Clemente, it’s my mom who has been taking 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 who did great things.” His mother’s reaction to seeing her face on a 20-foot statue in Manhattan was immediate and her entire reaction. “It’s like that picture makes me look old. “She’s the type of person that when she meets someone new, she wants to go get her eyebrows done.” He paused before adding: “It’s interesting how people see their image.”
The jar has a path cut through it – wide enough to walk through, and its inner walls are painted with blue and white graffiti lettering. It offers an invitation to step inside the ship and become a part of it. “People will walk by and hope they see something they recognize, and for a moment, maybe they come out of that invisibility, feeling like their lives matter and what they do on a daily basis matters. And that reminder, I think, is at the core of what I’m trying to do.”
As for the tap, Lugo doesn’t take the work seriously, despite its historic place in his personal history. “At the end of the day, I really think that when people walk away from this thing, they’re not going to think of a Roberto Lugo piece like Claes Oldenburg. They’re going to think: ‘Hey, remember that fire hydrant?’ Wasn’t that funny?” And to me, that’s actually more important.
Madison Square Park is not an accidental place for this kind of thinking. The conservancy has run its own public art program for more than 20 years and was the first public art organization to commission a U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2019. “Alfarero del Barrio” was originally curated by Brooke Kamin Rapoport, former curator of the MSPC, and executed by her successor Markonish.
“This is a huge platform for an artist like him,” Markonich told the Observer, adding that Madison Square Park attracts more than 60,000 visitors a day. “While Alvarero del Barrio references his ceramic practice, the exhibition expands his vision, marking an important turning point in his artistic path.”
A fire hydrant was installed in a grassy area near the park’s 25th Street entrance. The sculpture was made at Johnson Atelier in Hamilton, New Jersey, using blocks of CNC-guided high-density foam, assembled like a puzzle and covered in a layer of shellac resin making it waterproof, which might have been helpful had Lugo had his way with the faucet sculpture. He wanted to put her in the dog park.
“Alfarero del Barrio” will be on display in the park until December 6.
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