Roberto Lugo On Thinking Larger Than Life in Madison Square Park

When Roberto Lugo was a kid growing up in the gritty Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, summers were hot and dirty. Fortunately for Lugo, his father had a monkey wrench. The elder Lugo was that dad, the one who knew how to open a fire hydrant to cool things down and clean things up when the heat was on and the water was not.

“We became really famous in my neighborhood because of that,” Lugo told Observer on a sunny spring day in New York’s Madison Square Park. On nights when the water got shut off, he and his father would shower in the hydrant late, just the two of them sharing a bright green bar of Irish Spring soap. Years later, when a nascent passion for ceramics took hold of Roberto, those memories came to the fore. “The first thing that I made was a fire hydrant soap dispenser, and that kind of started me on this trajectory of like, oh yeah, art can tell a story. And it sort of becomes my superpower, right? It becomes a thing that makes me distinct.”

In the years since fashioning that first ceramic hydrant, Lugo’s superpower has landed him in 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 regularly fetch five figures at auction. For all his success, though, Lugo has not forgotten his roots in Kensington and those nights bathing by streetlight in the cool fire hydrant spray.

Today, a monumental version of that hydrant—15 feet tall, orange and tagged with graffiti—stands in Madison Square Park. It is the centerpiece of “Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter),” 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 portraits of Puerto Rican luminaries. Between them, Lugo placed four hand-painted domino tables around the park’s reflecting pool—BYOD, as MSPC curator Denise Markonish put it—and tire planters painted by Lugo and filled with native Puerto Rican plants chosen 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 mainland U.S. 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.

“I was really afraid for my life, to be honest,” he said. “Everybody would describe me as the scared kid. I knew I was growing up in a tough place and I didn’t want to fight. So I would hang around with my cousins and all of them were graffiti writers. In order to have this protection, I would just always hang around them, and then I started doing it, and I was pretty good.” He signed everything ‘Robske’—a tag he still puts on every piece he makes, including the giant orange hydrant now standing in one of Manhattan’s most trafficked public parks.

Through graffiti he learned more than how to sling tags and dodge cops. “Graffiti, for me, was about mattering. I’m putting my name up on a train, or a place where people can see it, so that I can matter.” The switch to clay was, in part, a plea for permanence. “It lasts for thousands of years. I’m using this medium that’s been used to tell us about cultures throughout history. And in many ways, I am putting my culture in a format that I know will go long beyond my years.”

After high school, with factory jobs behind him and drug dealing edging into his peripheral vision, he left Philadelphia for Florida where he enrolled in community college, took drawing classes and fell in love with ceramics. He bought a wheel and a kiln on Craigslist, set up in his parents’ kitchen, fired work by unplugging their stove and running the kiln off the same outlet and sold pots on eBay for $15. That eBay work was good enough to win him a scholarship to study at the Kansas City Art Institute. He earned a BFA, then an MFA from Pennsylvania State University.

His big gallery break came after he won an emerging artist award from the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts in 2015. When Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia called, he arrived lugging his work in orange Home Depot buckets. “They said, ‘How much are your teapots?’ And I said, ‘$35.’ They were like, ‘We can’t show work selling for $35. It’s going to be seen as art. It’s going to have to be at least $1,000, $2,000 for the teapots.’” The same teapots he couldn’t sell for a few dollars at a Pittsburgh craft fair weeks earlier sold out completely 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 Award, which came with $250,000 in unrestricted funds. With his work in major museums and selling in galleries, it would seem Lugo has little else to prove, but there he was in Madison Square Park doing just that.

“It’s the 250th anniversary of America and they’re giving a Puerto Rican the autonomy to choose what goes in here, and I’m choosing a bunch of Puerto Ricans,” he said of the people he chose to depict on the urn. “It’s not just Roberto Clemente—it’s my mom, who took one class at a time since I was in middle school to become a nurse. And then there’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, [Supreme Court Justice Sonia] Sotomayor, all these people who have done great things.” His mother’s reaction to seeing her face on a 20-foot sculpture in Manhattan was immediate and entirely her own. “She’s like, that picture makes me look old. She’s the kind of person that whenever she meets somebody new, she wants to go get her eyebrows done.” He paused before adding: “It’s interesting how people see their own image.”

The urn has an archway cut through it—wide enough to walk through, its interior walls painted with blue and white graffiti letterforms. It presents an invitation to step inside the vessel and become part of it. “People will just walk through here and hopefully they’ll see something they recognize, and for a moment, maybe they get out of that invisibility, and they feel like their life matters and what they’re doing on an everyday basis matters. And that reminder, I think, is really at the crux of what I’m trying to do.”

As for the hydrant, Lugo isn’t taking the work too seriously, despite its monumental place in his personal history. “At the end of the day, I really think when people walk away from this thing, they’re not gonna think about that Roberto Lugo piece like a Claes Oldenburg. They’re gonna think, ‘Hey, do you remember that fire hydrant? Wasn’t that funny?’ And for me, that’s actually more important.”

Madison Square Park is not an accidental venue for this kind of thinking. The conservancy has operated its own public art program for more than 20 years and was the first public art organization to commission the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2019. “Alfarero del Barrio” was originally curated by Brooke Kamin Rapoport, MSPC’s former curator, and carried forward by her successor Markonish.

“This is a huge platform for an artist like him,” Markonish told Observer, adding that Madison Square Park draws more than 60,000 visitors daily. “While Alfarero del Barrio nods to his ceramic practice, the exhibition expands his vision, marking a significant turning point in his artistic trajectory.”

The fire hydrant was installed on a grassy spot near the park’s 25th Street entrance. The sculpture was fabricated at Johnson Atelier in Hamilton, New Jersey, using blocks of high-density CNC-routed foam, assembled like a puzzle and covered in a resin shellac coating that makes it waterproof, which might have come in handy had Lugo been given his way in placing the hydrant sculpture. He wanted to put it in the park’s dog run.

“Alfarero del Barrio” will be on display in the park through December 6.

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