As a child rising up within the Kensington neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Roberto Lugo didn’t have entry to artwork courses at school. What he did have, although, was a drive to create, an ambition he expressed by tagging deserted buildings all through Philly. Later, he found clay and started merging his Puerto Rican heritage and love of hip-hop tradition with this millennia-old medium by creating graffiti-covered classical pots and urns.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and R&Firm. Commissioned by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy. Picture by Timothy Schenck)
Quick ahead twenty years and you could find W*400 artist’s work in collections starting from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, to the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition in Washington, DC. At present, you may as well discover his work out within the open, because of a particular public artwork fee from Madison Sq. Park in New York. The set up, known as ‘Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter)’ sees two monumental sculptures positioned within the verdant city respite – a 20-foot-tall urn and a 15-foot-tall hearth hydrant.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and R&Firm. Commissioned by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy. Picture by Timothy Schenck)
The urn is modeled on an vintage Herend design, first designed for Queen Victoria within the Nineteenth-century. However in lieu of butterflies and flowers, Lugo has embellished it with symbols and portraits honouring his Puerto Rican heritage. Most notable are the eight luminaries depicted on the perimeters of the urn, from music celebrity Dangerous Bunny to US Supreme Court docket Justice Sonia Sotomayor to Lugo’s personal mother and father. Exuberant, graffiti-inspired motifs wrap the sculpture from base to finial, together with photographs of hibiscus blooms, vines, chickens, dominoes and billowing Puerto Rican flags.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and R&Firm. Commissioned by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy. Picture by Timothy Schenck)
For Lugo, it was necessary to current representations of his neighborhood on a vessel traditionally reserved for the privileged. ‘We’re an extremely resourceful individuals,’ Lugo says of Puerto Ricans. ‘We come from a historical past of our ancestors being enslaved, of colonisation, of all these social points that created a historical past of poverty. For me this set up is a celebration of us overcoming.’
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and R&Firm. Commissioned by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy. Picture by Timothy Schenck)
On the jap fringe of the park is a towering hearth hydrant, painted in a shiny orange-red and tagged with graffiti. For Lugo, the sculpture has particular significance – as a child, his father would crack open the neighbourhood hearth hydrant so youngsters might play and funky off throughout a sweltering summer season day. However for him, the image holds deeper that means, a metaphor for a wider state of emergency that marginalised communities could discover themselves in – particularly because the US celebrates its 250th anniversary.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and R&Firm. Commissioned by Madison Sq. Park Conservancy. Picture by Timothy Schenck)
All of it comes again to expressing the fun and struggles of the Puerto Rican expertise – a story that’s distinctly American. ‘The art work that I am most interested in as an individual is one thing that tells a narrative,’ Lugo displays. ‘A professor of mine has this previous adage: The extra private a narrative is, the extra common it turns into.’
‘Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter)’ is on view by means of 6 December 2026 in Madison Sq. Park
(Picture credit score: Timothy Schenck)
