EASTON PRIBBLE LECTURE SERIES
Roberto Lugo
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 12 p.m.
Museum of Art | Sinnott Family – Bank of Utica Auditorium
Artist Bio
Roberto Lugo creates defiant genre-mixing works that confront the function and subject matter of high art objects from Classical Antiquity, East Asia, the Italian Renaissance, 17th-century Europe, and beyond. Using the ancient medium of clay as his canvas, Lugo both calls attention to intergenerational experiences of racial injustice while celebrating African American and Latino culture.
Ceramic as an artistic medium is important to Lugo because of its anthropological context. Over the course of history, finely-crafted ceramic objects stood as a symbol of class, privilege, and the aristocracy. Lugo intervenes in these histories and countless more to create a new mode of storytelling that blends narrative and portraiture with cross-disciplinary techniques and time-honored forms in order to introduce those notably absent from the art historical canon. The result is distinctive works in clay unified by Lugo’s call for representation.
Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, a US Artist Award, and most recently the Heinz Award for the Arts. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, and more.
About the Easton Pribble Lecture Series
Seasoned artists are invited to Utica to give presentations as part of the Easton Pribble Lecture Series at the Museum of Art. Named for a beloved late professor of painting and drawing, the mission of the series is to invite guest artists who represent a variety of creative disciplines and bring a diversity of perspectives to inspire, motivate, and challenge students. A faculty-led committee invites artists to Utica each year who amplify voices and illuminate career pathways historically and presently marginalized within the art and design worlds.
