Exhibition | Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black
What Had Happened Was: Ruby Bridges, from the series Orange and Black, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and R & Company, New York. © Roberto Lugo. Photo: Joseph Hu">Displaying historical and contemporary objects side by side encourages us to look at art in new ways, to ask new questions of each object and each period, and to think diachronically about how a particular artistic practice or mode of representation might change or stay constant in response to shifting contexts. This exhibition explores the tensions—and the commonalities—between objects past and present through the juxtaposition of recent ceramic works by Roberto Lugo from his series Orange and Black with ancient Greek vessels from the Museum’s collections, asking the visitor to contemplate, to be surprised, and, above all, to look closely.
In the first gallery of the exhibition, visitors encounter two ceramic vessels—one by Lugo and the other by an ancient Greek artist known only as the Hephaistos Painter. Lugo’s vessel Same Boy, Different Breakfast holds together two possibilities for a young man’s life. On one side a young man sits at his bedroom desk, while on the other he sits in a prison cell. The fifth-century BCE Greek example also depicts two aspects of a young male citizen’s life in Athens, with joyful celebration in the symposium—a ritual drinking gathering—juxtaposed with the more somber civic duty required of citizens. Common to both vessels is the artists’ desire to play with viewers’ potential experience of scenes on either side of a vase. Visitors are invited to walk around each vessel and to find moments of (dis)connection between ancient and modern.
Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black. Photos: Joseph Hu">The relationship between ceramic and human bodies is explored in the second gallery. On one work, Lugo depicts the schoolgirl Ruby Bridges as she is escorted by her mother and US marshals to her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 4, 1960. Here, the focus is primarily on Ruby’s body—her own personhood and experience of the world as an African American child—after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of integrating schools in 1960. On What Had Happened Was: In Memory, Lugo considers the absence of a body—and of a person—from society, with the depiction of two friends mourning the loss of a loved one. The ancient vessels within this section display the creative possibilities for rendering a three-dimensional, animate body on the surface of a vase, presenting it in contorted, abstracted, or cropped proportions. Completing this gallery is a series of garniture (decorative) heads, made by Lugo in response to a female head vase in Princeton’s collections. Taken together, these objects collectively meditate on the representation of the human form, the links between human and ceramic bodies, and the presence of the artist, contemporary or ancient, whose hands shaped these objects.
In the third gallery, the focus shifts to decoration and the ways that Lugo creatively plays with, builds upon, and transforms the types of ornamentation found across ancient Greek ceramics and architecture—at times preserving Greek geometric motifs and at others inserting images from his own life in Philadelphia. For instance, unbroken meander lines recalling ocean waves and large palmettes are joined by encircling chains, graffiti, crowns, trolley cars, decorative fans, and a three-dimensional, snakelike gray dragon, building a continuum of artistic creation and decoration that visually links the ceramics made in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE with those produced by Lugo in 2024.
The last room in the exhibition turns to storytelling. While ceramics are most often functional objects, in ancient Greece they were also vehicles for conveying narratives. On such vessels, gods and heroes could meet in battle, ritual processions could take place, or two individuals might stand together in quiet contemplation. This attention to storytelling, this drive to represent narratives about obstacles in one’s life or about moments of joy, to draw out aspects of one’s lived experience, connects Lugo’s work with the efforts of ancient potters and painters. The three vessels Lugo made for this gallery belong to a new subseries, titled What Had Happened Was, in which the artist retells the stories of people of color, elevating and drawing attention to their personal narratives, and connecting them with the broader history of art. Scenes from the lives of Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, and the Central Park Five each encircle a vase, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in these figures’ stories and to accept the discomfort of being confronted with the realities of the modern world.
Foundational to Lugo’s practice, as underscored by this exhibition, is his own close looking—at historical artistic processes that inform his work, and at his own life and the lives of those around him. Whether he looks at Chinese, Greek, or European ceramics, in each instance Lugo notes, “I don’t want to make an exact replica, but I think about what contemporary version of that thing would look like. . . . I try to imagine what it would have been like to look at each object for the first time . . . and make a connection with my experiences and the stories I want to tell.” What is so intriguing about Lugo’s work is precisely this temporal nimbleness, where the past and present fuse and collapse, all within the form and decoration of a ceramic vessel.
Carolyn Laferrière
Associate Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art
Art@Bainbridge is made possible by the generous support of the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; Barbara and Gerald Essig; Gene Locks, Class of 1959, and Sueyun Locks; and Ivy Beth Lewis.
Additional support for Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black is provided by the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation; and Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Program in Latin American Studies, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies (with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund), Department of African American Studies, Graduate School—Access, Diversity and Inclusion, Effron Center for the Study of America, and Program in Latino Studies.