Roberto Lugo brings monumental tribute to Puerto Rican culture to Manhattan park – The Art Newspaper

Manhattan’s Madison Square Park is now home to a vibrant monument to Puerto Rican excellence in the form of a 20ft-tall urn, its panels featuring portraits of the reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny, the US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor, the actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, the baseball legend Roberto Clemente and others. Among the famous figures are two less recognisable subjects, Gilberto and Maribel Lugo, the parents of artist Roberto Lugo.

“We come from a history of being enslaved and being colonised, and this installation is a visual representation of Puerto Rican overcoming,” Lugo said during an opening event on 20 May. “Without my mother and father, I wouldn’t have gotten to this point.”

Best known for his ceramic works that meld iconography from graffiti, hip-hop culture and historical decorative-arts traditions from Europe and Asia, Lugo has created the monumental urn, Capicú de Cariño (I Heard It Both Ways) (2026) for the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s latest exhibition commission, Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter).

In addition to the portraits on its exterior, Capicú de Cariño features a passageway that visitors can walk through and pose in—the “215” on its ceiling refers to the area code of Lugo’s hometown of Philadelphia—adding an interactive element to the work. As part of the exhibition, Lugo also installed several planters made from car tyres that hold plants native to Puerto Rico and four hand-painted domino tables around the park’s reflecting pool.

“For me, art is a celebration, and it is for the viewer to interpret and engage with, and take what they can from it,” Lugo said. “Art creates a sense of empathy and humanity, and that openness is so important right now.”

On the park’s east side, Lugo has installed a 15ft-tall orange fire hydrant, Para Los Días Caliente (This Is For The Hot Ones) (2026), which he tagged with the phrase “se vende” (for sale), seemingly inviting others to tag the sculpture in yet another gesture of openness and interaction. Within a day of the sculpture’s installation, members of the public had already obliged, adding their own tags and stickers.

The exhibition’s two large-scale sculptures were created at the Johnson Atelier, a studio and fabrication facility in Hamilton, New Jersey, which is named for the public sculptor Seward Johnson and next-door to the Grounds for Sculpture museum and arboretum. Lugo made his first monument-scaled sculpture during a residency there in 2022, and it became the centrepiece of his solo exhibition The Village Potter (2022-23).

“This exhibition’s title, Alfarero del Barrio or Village Potter, reflects just how important community is to Roberto,” Denise Markonish, the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s chief curator, said. “Madison Square Park functions as its own kind of community and neighbourhood.”

While the message of his monument to important Puerto Ricans is fairly unambiguous, the artist resisted committing to a singular meaning behind the giant fire hydrant. It was inspired in part by his childhood in Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican community, where his father possessed the only wrench on the block capable of opening fire hydrants and providing relief on sweltering summer days.

But, he said sincerely, he looks forward to local residents photographing their elegant dogs in front of the sculpture. He also suggested interpretations linking the sculpture to the fire hoses used on protesters during the Civil Rights era would not be wrong, nor would a general sense that it might convey a desire to douse the heated tone of political rhetoric and division in the US.

“I’ve been thinking of this project in the context of the 250th anniversary of the country,” Lugo said. “We are so segregated in how we think about different cultures and communities in the US, we tend to forget all the synergies.”

• Roberto Lugo: Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter), until 7 December, Madison Square Park, New York