Roberto Lugo’s Ceramics Are the Artifacts of a Future Past 

Like a well-told story, Roberto Lugo’s current solo exhibition takes an unexpected turn. In addition to a selection of his recent ceramic works that draw on ancient Grecian vessels dating back to the 5th century BCE, the Philadelphia-based artist is showing a series of sculptural fragments that have been made strange and weathered, as if they too have just been unearthed after centuries.  

On view at the Princeton University Art Museum through July 6, “Orange and Black” is anchored by a recent series of vases that transpose narrative scenes of Black and Latinx cultural and community histories—ranging from depictions of revered athletes, such as Roberto Clemente, to glimpses into the life of a neighborhood—onto amphora and lekythos, using the aesthetic motifs of Greco-Roman red figure pottery. Lugo’s pieces dilate the act of looking, offering multiple points of entry for the viewer by evoking both the visual narrative strategies of graphic novels and the formal qualities of the tableaux that decorate these ancient Greek ceramics, examples of which are included in this exhibition.

The scale of Lugo’s vessels, ranging from 1.5–2.5 feet tall, allows for viewers to observe the skill required to execute each work, like in the quarter-inch distance between the curved lip and handle in Same Boy, Different Breakfast (all works 2024). His contemporary pieces affirm the presence of the maker’s hand, pushing against the gravitas of that is often reserved solely for Grecian vessels and not for ones like Lugo’s.

In juxtaposing old and new vessels, the exhibition further draws out points of resonance between objects made more than two millennia apart. In his decoration, for example, Lugo riffs on the motifs found in many of the ancient vessels on view nearby, emulating their geometric meanders and floral elements and incorporating recognizable forms such as chains and three-pointed crowns. In shifting the gaze between Lugo’s works and their ancient forebears, a spirit of play transcends both. The precisely rendered fold of drapery falling across the decorative border of a krater from 460 BCE punctures the illusion that these figures are bound within the frame. Likewise, Lugo’s two relief fragments—one depicting a pigeon, the other a rooster—act as winking invitations for viewers to envision the missing fragments as whole: what frieze might have honored the now abhorred pigeon, he seems to ask.  

When taken at face value, this playful spirit could be read as just a clever cultural mash-up between the ancient and the contemporary. However, to begin and end there overlooks the temporal slippage that viewers experience when considering that perhaps these artworks might actually be artifacts recovered from a distant future, his vessels the only surviving documents of our recent history. Take his new series “What Had Happened Was,” which depict scenes from the lives of Selena Quintanilla, Ruby Bridges, Jackie Robinson, and the Central Park Five. To a contemporary viewer, these scenes and their significance, specifically to communities of color, are relatively legible, whether they be moments of leisure or activism. The Quintanilla scene, for example, shows the crowds of the late Tejano singer drew, while the Bridges scene show the racist protesters the six-year-old Ruby faced as she integrated a school in New Orleans.

The same cannot be assumed of the antiquities nearby, and the meanings of these scenes is not only remote without context, but have themselves been subject to countless reinterpretations and misinterpretations in the decades since their excavations. In this way, Lugo’s remixed ceramics generate a provocation for the viewer: If Lugo’s works were to be viewed more than 2,000 years into the future, what meaning could be discerned? What of their significance would translate across time?

To foreground this question has the effect of unsettling our grasp on what is familiar. Examining Lugo’s works from this angle, a recurring and vexing detail emerges: the artist does not differentiate skin tones in his figures, many of whom notably broke color lines in baseball, public schooling, and music. It could be that the artist is merely emulating the style of red figure pottery, with the medium’s orange-brown ground standing in for their melanated skin color. Others might argue that Lugo is asserting a shared humanity that transcends racial and ethnic identity. However, Lugo’s rendering of Robinson’s uniform in white and blue makes clear that this stylistic element is intentional.

In 2025, the work exists at a time when recognizing slavery and segregation as historical facts has been debated by revisionists and recently decreed, by executive order, to constitute a “divisive narrative.” A work like What Had Happened Was: The Path, depicting Harriet Tubman leading a procession of enslaved people to freedom, brings to the fore just how fragile these stories are. As a result, the hypothetical question of how these histories can and will be understood in a future absent the frameworks that contextualize them becomes less distant. That future, in essence, is now.

By offering a longer chronological view at a moment marked by the institutional erosion of historical context and memory, “Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black” invites viewers to engage in a thought experiment that casts them into an unknowable future, asking what our descendants will piece together from the fragments we leave behind, what will they pull from the wreckage and ruin, and what stories they will be able to glean.