Exhibition: Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black
The Princeton University Art Museum is at a moment of vital reinvention, having begun construction in 2021 on a wholly new, 145,000 square-foot facility that will open at the heart of campus in 2025. While its main facility is under construction, the Museum has continued to provide audiences with impactful engagement with art through a dynamic slate of programming, including exhibitions presented in two satellite venues in downtown Princeton.
The exhibition project Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black will be on view at the Museum’s Art@Bainbridge galleries on Nassau Street from February 15, 2025, through July 6, 2025. This project will feature the art of Roberto Lugo, a Philadelphia-based artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator. Lugo’s ceramics vessels draw on forms and ornament from historic ceramic vessels and recontextualize their visual iconography to pay homage to underrepresented people of color. Their hand-painted surfaces feature elements of urban life and portraits of individuals who have been historically absent from luxury vessels, such as Sojourner Truth, Dr. Cornel West, and The Notorious BIG, as well as stories of Lugo’s own life and the lives of his family members in the United States and Puerto Rico.
Throughout his Orange and Black series, Roberto Lugo uses the pictorial narrative structures and formal decorative possibilities inherent to the ancient Athenian medium, replacing Greek myth with his own stories and adapting Athenian ornamental decoration with the imagery that pervades the modern Philadelphian landscape. Lugo creates a new mythology and visual vocabulary of life in America, highlighting issues of oppression, inequality, race, socio-economic hardship, and incarceration. Displayed alongside Lugo’s artworks are the ancient Greek vessels that inspired him, inviting visitors to consider both his place within the long history of ceramic use and production, as well as the crucial role the medium has played in facilitating storytelling and societal interaction.
Roberto 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 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship, a Rome Prize, and a US Artist Award. His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, and more.
The Art@Bainbridge project Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black offers an important opportunity for audiences from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds to see themselves reflected in the galleries and to feel welcomed by the Museum. The Museum’s education team will work closely with the artist; with exhibition curator Carolyn Laferrière, the Museum’s Associate Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art; and with campus and community partners to develop programming to reach existing audiences and underrepresented groups new to Museum programs
Image: Photo by Joe Kramm, Courtesy of R & Company
Cosponsored by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies (with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund), Curtis W. McGraw Foundation; the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation; and Princeton University’s Humanities Council; Program in Latin American Studies; Department of African American Studies; Graduate School—Access, Diversity and Inclusion; Effron Center for the Study of America; and Program in Latino Studies.

Photo by Joe Kramm, Courtesy of R & Company