Historic Pottery Styles Meet Pop Culture and Contemporary Issues in Roberto Lugo's Sculptures

"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."

"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."

"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."

Amphorae functioned across centuries as utilitarian vessels and as finely thrown, decorated objects that depicted mythological narratives. Roberto Lugo integrates amphora silhouettes and historic ceramics styles such as Wedgwood and Delftware into sculptural stoneware vessels that incorporate graffiti and portraits of notable Black figures. "Black figure" operates as a double entendre linking classical pottery terminology and contemporary Black likenesses. Traditional Greek red-figure and black-figure techniques informed surface treatment and narrative placement. Lugo’s works serve as monuments to North Philadelphia and Hip Hop culture while addressing resilience, memory, visual culture, material heritage, and social inequalities.

Read at Colossal