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Roberto Lugo On Thinking Larger Than Life in Madison Square Park

"At the end of the day, I really think when people walk away from this thing, they're not gonna think about that Lugo piece like a Claes Oldenburg. They're gonna think, 'Hey, do you remember that fire hydrant? Wasn't that funny?' And for me, that's actually more important."

When Roberto Lugo was a kid growing up in the gritty Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, summers were hot and dirty. Fortunately for Lugo, his father had a monkey wrench. The elder Lugo was that dad, the one who knew how to open a fire hydrant to cool things down and clean things up when the heat was on and the water was not.

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“We became really famous in my neighborhood because of that,” Lugo told Observer on a sunny spring day in New York’s Madison Square Park. On nights when the water got shut off, he and his father would shower in the hydrant late, just the two of them sharing a bright green bar of Irish Spring soap. Years later, when a nascent passion for ceramics took hold of Roberto, those memories came to the fore. “The first thing that I made was a fire hydrant soap dispenser, and that kind of started me on this trajectory of like, oh yeah, art can tell a story. And it sort of becomes my superpower, right? It becomes a thing that makes me distinct.”

In the years since fashioning that first ceramic hydrant, Lugo’s superpower has landed him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Walters Art Museum, among others, and his ceramics regularly fetch five figures at auction. For all his success, though, Lugo has not forgotten his roots in Kensington and those nights bathing by streetlight in the cool fire hydrant spray.

Today, a monumental version of that hydrant—15 feet tall, orange and tagged with graffiti—stands in Madison Square Park. It is the centerpiece of “Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter),” commissioned by the........

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