The Clay Studio presents American Crib: What’s Happening

American Crib kicks off the major celebratory Radical Americana, a city-wide 250th-anniversary initiative spearheaded by The Clay Studio. It features “research-driven work” in 25 exhibitions in varying venues featuring 45 artists. As its signature event, Lugo’s work embodies its goal of celebrating cultural identity while inviting both reflection and eye-opening dialogues.

Witty, chilling, trenchant

In the emotional remarks that opened American Crib, the artist explained (probably unnecessarily) to a diverse and very knowledgeable audience of ceramists, art insiders, and supporters that “crib” is vernacular for the place where you live. Here, Lugo created the apartment of “someone from Kensington who had access to art history”, an apt description of the artist himself.

His works here continue to utilize traditional European and Asian ceramic techniques rendered with 21st-century brio. They reference artists as diverse as Da Vinci, William Morris, and Magritte, with a wide range that can be read as a history of decorative and fine arts. American Crib is filled with galvanizing ceramics, furniture, and decorative pieces showcasing enormous skill and also providing the witty-but-chilling trenchant social commentary that has come to define Lugo’s work.

Traditional forms, contemporary images

Any number of arresting creations could center this charmingly expansive exhibition. There are the large Della-Robia style plaques (2023) from the Della Robske series: Maribel and Child and Roundel with Bust of Poet. The Della Robia family were 15th-century Florentine artists known for their colorful tin-glazed terracotta works. Lugo has recreated the technique, but he’s filled these referential (and reverential) works with contemporary images—one of the requisite cherubs is in blackface. Both of these three-foot-square “wallworks” are embedded in gilded birch frames that look perfectly period but have unexpected details nestled in the corners.

In works both large and small, this merging of traditional forms and contemporary imagery has become a Lugo ceramics signature. There are the delicate Putti Statuettes I – VI (2022-2023), ceramics glazed with luster, that take a contemporary spin on Medieval and Renaissance statuary. From afar, six beautifully thrown teapots employ the traditional form of Sevres or Worcester porcelain, but on close inspection they are illuminated with figures like Malcom X and Ralph Ellison or spellbinding graffiti motifs.

As well as intimate pieces, Lugo is noted for his ability to produce huge-scale ceramics. He has monumental work at New Jersey’s Grounds for Sculpture, and in May he’ll be installing a 25-foot-tall vase in New York’s Madison Square Park. But here, equally impressive up close is the huge five-foot-tall, glazed stoneware urn titled Pot to Piss In (2026). A masterpiece of the potter’s technique, it is covered with a filigree of contemporary images. Lugo noted that it had just come out of the kiln on the morning of the exhibition, causing a frisson of shudders among the many potters present. Regardless of its iconography—on which (like many Lugo works) there is a plethora—the sheer size alone carries a message. It makes that traditional expression of scarcity (as in “not even a …) into something monumental.

“Being kind is free”

More traditional, the exhibition also features several large paintings. Alberto Ayala (2026, acrylic on wood) is a portrait of Lugo’s father, and Maria of the Block (acrylic on canvas) is Lugo’s homage to Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. There is a sofa made of cement blocks, and plastic milk crates are used for seating throughout, referencing everyone’s first apartment and the mix of “high” and “low” that is the bedrock of the artist’s practice.

But as well as a visual artist, Lugo is also a poet, and rap-style, he chanted his 10 commandments for artists. One of them is that “being bitter is expensive; being kind is free.” And early in his career, he exemplified that maxim. Lugo set up potting wheels throughout his Philadelphia neighborhood, encouraging anyone passing by to stop and make something, bringing into sharp relief his belief that clay is a medium anyone can access and use to express themselves.

A hometown shout-out

This must-see exhibition is the artist’s hometown shout-out, with Lugo in residence at The Clay Studio. And while his practice may have begun intimately and on the streets, it is now spreading widely. He has works held in major museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and Atlanta’s High Museum, to name just a few. And among his many accolades are Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures Award, a Pew Fellowship, and the Polsky Rome Prize.

As an increasingly visible citizen of the world, Lugo merges his unique vision, technical prowess, and a clear eye on social issues to create works both elevated and approachable. He seeks to be “a liminal agent” cultivating the grace to forgive and the energy to “push people in the right direction.” American Crib makes a powerful case for that fact Lugo’s direction—inclusive, technically dazzling, yet still socially focused and gimlet-eyed—is the right direction.

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