Summer Series: Roberto Lugo and Carmen Hermo

Jul 9, 2026 12:30PM-1:30PM

Schermer Meeting Hall

Community Engagement and Dialogue

The Summer Series program features some of the most influential artists of our time, exploring the work of world-renowned creators in conversation with today’s leading critics, curators, and collectors. Join us for a conversation in Schermer Meeting Hall at Anderson Ranch Arts Center with Roberto Lugo and Carmen Hermo. 

Summer Series lectures are free, open to the public, and available in person or via livestream. Registration is appreciated.

Roberto Lugo creates defiant genre-mixing works that confront the function and subject matter of high art objects from Classical Antiquity, East Asia, the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth-century Europe, and beyond. Using the ancient medium of clay as his canvas, Lugo both calls attention to intergenerational experiences of racial injustice while celebrating African American and Latino culture.

Ceramic as an artistic medium is important to Lugo because of its anthropological context. Over the course of history, finely-crafted ceramic objects stood as a symbol of class, privilege, and the aristocracy. Lugo intervenes in these histories, and countless more, to create a new mode of storytelling that blends narrative and portraiture with cross-disciplinary techniques and time-honored forms in order to introduce those notably absent from the art historical canon. The result is distinctive works in clay unified by Lugo’s call for representation.

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 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, a US Artist Award, and most recently the Heinz Award for the Arts. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, and more.

Carmen Hermo is the Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She co-curated the exhibitions Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude (April 3 – August 2 2026), Counter History: Contemporary Art from the Collection and other collection presentations, as well as The Banner Project: Mark Thomas Gibson. 

Previously, she was Associate Curator for the Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art, where she curated María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold (2023–25), Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive (2021); Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Are We Reading Closely? (2020); Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making (2017); and formed part of the curatorial collective for Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall (2019). She organized the Brooklyn presentations of Liza Lou: Trailer (2023); Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2018) and Andy Warhol: Revelation (2021), and co-curated Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection (2018), among other projects. Carmen has also worked as the Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum, and with the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her independent projects include CURRENTS: An Overwhelming Response (A.I.R. Gallery, 2020), and New Voices: On Transformation (Print Center New York, 2023). Carmen received her B.A. in art history and English from the University of Richmond and her M.A. in art history from Hunter College. In 2019, she was honored by Project for Empty Space with a Badass Art Woman Award.

Panel

Roberto Lugo

Summer Series Speaker

Roberto Lugo creates defiant genre-mixing works that confront the function and subject matter of high art objects from Classical Antiquity, East Asia, the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth-century Europe, and beyond. Using the ancient medium of clay as his canvas, Lugo both calls attention to intergenerational experiences of racial injustice while celebrating African American and Latino culture. Ceramic as an artistic medium is important to Lugo because of its anthropological context. Over the course of history, finely-crafted ceramic objects stood as a symbol of class, privilege, and the aristocracy. Lugo intervenes in these histories, and countless more, to create a new mode of storytelling that blends narrative and portraiture with cross-disciplinary techniques and time-honored forms in order to introduce those notably absent from the art historical canon. The result is distinctive works in clay unified by Lugo’s call for representation. 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 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, a US Artist Award, and most recently the Heinz Award for the Arts. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, and more.

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Carmen Hermo

Summer Series Speaker

Carmen Hermo is the Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She co-curated the exhibitions Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude (April 3 – August 2 2026), Counter History: Contemporary Art from the Collection and other collection presentations, as well as The Banner Project: Mark Thomas Gibson.  Previously, she was Associate Curator for the Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art, where she curated María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold (2023–25), Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive (2021); Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Are We Reading Closely? (2020); Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making (2017); and formed part of the curatorial collective for Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall (2019). She organized the Brooklyn presentations of Liza Lou: Trailer (2023); Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2018) and Andy Warhol: Revelation (2021), and co-curated Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection (2018), among other projects. Carmen has also worked as the Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum, and with the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her independent projects include CURRENTS: An Overwhelming Response (A.I.R. Gallery, 2020), and New Voices: On Transformation (Print Center New York, 2023). Carmen received her B.A. in art history and English from the University of Richmond and her M.A. in art history from Hunter College. In 2019, she was honored by Project for Empty Space with a Badass Art Woman Award.

Learn More