(dramatic music) (audience chattering) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(dramatic music continues) (audience applauding) - Welcome everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we bring you ceramicist, storyteller, activist, the village potter, Roberto Lugo.

Some very, very lucky people in this auditorium got to have some very special, dedicated and intimate time with Roberto yesterday in the ceramic studio at the Stamp school.

It was really a very special and beautiful opportunity.

So, and now today you are all the lucky ones who will also get to be in his presence.

And I wanna say big shout out to Quinn, Hunter, and Nicole Marroquin for making that workshop happen.

(audience applauding) Mm-hmm.

Also, a big thank you to our dedicated partners, the Institute for the Humanities, and series partners, the U of M Arts Initiative, Detroit PBS, PBS Books, and Michigan Public.

Please do remember we have a special Penny Stamp Speaker Series event tomorrow at the Museum of Art or UMA, that's gonna be part of their fall opening celebration.

That's gonna be a 7 pm talk in the Helmut Stern Auditorium downstairs.

This is a conversation with the curator Dana Miller and poet John Yao about the work of Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith who are in the show, "Both Sides of the Line" currently on view there.

So please do join us for that.

And this evening we have an opening of an exhibition which follows directly after this talk here.

So after we finish this event here, join us at the Stamps Gallery, which is just down the street on Liberty.

And then take a right on Division.

This is an opening reception for Untold Stories part 2, a Stamps Faculty Exhibition featuring the work of Stamps faculty, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Annica Cuppetelli, Quinn Hunter, Carol Jacobsen, Andy Kirshner, Rebekah Modrak, and Ricky Weaver.

So please do join us for that directly after this event.

Please do remember to silence those cell phones.

Better yet, turn them off.

We will have a Q&A today.

In here, you'll notice there are microphones at the end of each aisle here.

When the moment comes and Roberto is ready for questions, he will invite you to line up, and we'll see how many questions we have time to get to.

And now for a proper introduction of our guest, we have a fairly recent addition to our Stamps community here, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, he is himself a ceramicist and sculptor.

He's currently an assistant professor here at the Stamps School.

He is also an onsite liaison for the NCECA, or the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Conference that is going to take place in Detroit here next March.

I'm sure we'll have lots more to share on that as that conference comes into view.

But for now, Ebi is with us.

Please welcome Ebi Baralaye.

(audience applauding) - Hello everyone.

I am Ebitenyefa Baralaye.

I am again one of the professors here at Stamps and it is my great pleasure to introduce Roberto Lugo this evening.

First, I want to thank Lugo for his generosity in the demonstration and workshop he shared in Nicole Marroquin's ceramics class yesterday.

I have long admired Roberto's work, but spending time with him as a teacher and speaker has reminded me that he is as gifted in sharing knowledge and serving community as he is in shaping clay.

I first met Roberto in 2015 when he visited the Cranbrook Academy of Art as a guest artist.

I happened to pick him up at the airport, and I can't recall our exact conversation on the way back to Cranbrook, but just days before I had listened to a YouTube recording of his 2015 Emerging Artist talk given at NCECA which I encourage you all to look up.

I was floored by how profoundly the narrative of Lugo's life intertwined with his work in clay.

It became clear to me then as has become clear to so many other since that Roberto's practice epitomizes what it means for clay to be a medium that unites, heals, and tells stories that matter.

Lugo is not only a potter, educator, and activist, but also a poet and storyteller.

His words and vessels flow together weaving narratives from his lived experience, hip hop, and history.

He draws equally from Worcester porcelain and the Wu-Tang Clan.

Producing bodies of work that are deeply rooted, yet radically expansive.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His most recent solo show with R & company in New York City further affirmed his position as one of the most vital voices in contemporary ceramics.

Lugo has received numerous awards including the 2019 Pew Fellowship Award, and the 2021 Heinz Award for the Arts.

His work is held in major public and private collections, and his reach continues to expand through teaching, public projects, and collaborations that amplify the voices and histories of underrepresented communities.

I'll end by quoting a part of Roberto Lugo's video piece titled "Ghetto is Resourceful," where he reflects on how creativity emerges from necessity and resilience.

That ethos of making, teaching, and thriving against the odds is embedded in everything he does.

"I've got my two hands up.

One is up to ask a question, and the other is up because I have the answer to prove to you I can make something beautiful out of dirt.

I am resourceful, I am ghetto, I am brown, I am you.

Let's find each other in the dirt and create a vessel in which we can drink from ourselves, our knowledge, our experiences, on a table where everyone's invited.

A place where our differences are what makes us most desirable.

A curriculum where hate is put up against love, and finally loses."

Please join me in welcoming Roberto Lugo.

(audience applauding and cheering) - Somebody once told me that I would die before I'd be something.

More likely to sigh before I see something, more likely to fry before I free something.

You see, I'm not the one that's gonna tell you how you should feel.

You may not know my pain, but you understand how the sutures feel 'cause when it rains you understand how a roof will feel.

I see the act of making pots as a metaphor for my life.

Somehow taking the ground we walk on and turning it into something that we admire.

Something that we search all day for the perfect spot for.

I grew up in Philadelphia.

These are three of the houses that we grew up in.

I want you to pay attention to the house on the left, which is stairs that go to nowhere, which I think is a metaphor for a lot of our experiences.

And you know, one of the things about growing up where I did was there was a lot of lessons that happened, but I didn't know that they were lessons at the time.

They were just sort of our normal everyday experience.

So for example, on these steps, my mom once got a letter.

It was a credit card application.

Back in the day you would get a letter from a bank and it would say you can pick a Visa or you can pick a MasterCard.

And my mom was like, "Rover, I'm gonna get the Visa card because nobody's the master but Jesus."

(audience laughing) And what's interesting is when I look back at that, I'm like, well she just didn't understand what master meant or the wrong context or you know, the English was off, and you know all these things that since I've gone to school and got a graduate degree, you could look back at that language and break down in a very different way.

But in reality, what was happening was I was learning Spanish at home, and I was hearing English outside.

So I was hearing Nirvana play on MTV, I was hearing the Notorious BIG and Tupac and the Wu-Tang clan.

And then I realized that all these elements of our lives, things that we can see as deficits, these things that you might see as defects actually become our effects.

So hearing her hear a word and take an entirely different meaning has become something that I use as an asset in my own work.

So for example, we could take the word granted, I don't take nothing for granted, was born with a heart of granite.

But granted, if I was granted chief commander, I would do better than Grant did.

And that's with or without a grand, kid.

You ever have a pain in your heart that no drug can fix, and leaks down in your stomach and makes you sick.

You could try everything you can, but there ain't no fix to get rid of it.

But hear my words and stand tall like a New York Knick.

I know you dealing with nitwits and smoking your cigarettes and chewing your Nicorettes and filling your stomach with liquid as strong as liquor gets.

But listen up, those who fall are destined to ball.

'Cause in spite of it all, you're the first people call when they're pressed to the wall from dealing with y'all.

So don't get mad when this world don't think you're a 10.

'Cause in the end, those who've seen this world's ugly are doms in the end.

Believe me, I know you hear the voices in your head that tell you the world'd be better if you were shot or dead.

But you also ignore the sounds of people that surround and tell you the pain you caused if you weren't around.

Believe me, you can survive anything.

Believe me, you are beautiful, intelligent, no, you don't need a struggle to be relevant.

Your value is evident, and all that self-doubt is just stunting your development.

Believe me, you remember your days full of hope?

'Fore you were told nope, but it's still there.

Take a second and breathe the still air.

And remind yourself that people still care.

'Cause believe me, you have a lot of life to live.

You have a lot to give, and we're glad you're still here.

I made that video when I was in school 'cause we had these critiques, and sometimes when people would put things together haphazardly, someone would be like, "Oh, you like kind of ghetto rigged that."

And as somebody comes from an impoverished neighborhood, mostly of Black and Latino people.

Initially I took offense to that.

But then I realized that ghetto is another word for resourcefulness.

It's people who do a lot with very little.

You take people who come from where I do, you give them a hundred dollars and you send them to the grocery store, they're gonna approach that very different than people who don't come from where I am.

My experience with art started in the streets of Philadelphia.

Philly is really known for its murals, and I didn't have art in school.

But what I would see every day when I was walking through school amongst the crime, amongst the drug sales, amongst the sex work, were murals of people of color and graffiti.

We were just outside admiring the graffiti in the little alleyway out here.

And what it remind me of is the reason why I started doing graffiti wasn't so that I can get my name out there or so that I can become a famous artist.

It was for protection.

I wanted to be around my older cousins who were much tougher than I was.

They always used to call me scared and they gave me a graffiti name.

And still to this day, if you go to the MAT, if you go to the Museum of Fine Arts, if you go to a lot of world renowned museums, you'll see their names written on those pots.

Yeah, I saw a lot of crime growing up, and graffiti really gave me an opportunity to put my name in a place where I felt like my life mattered.

I didn't realize that years later I'd be working in the medium that we used anthropologically to tell us about cultures throughout history.

A medium that lasts for thousands of years.

But I was being influenced.

Has anybody here ever heard of the Wu-Tang Clan?

I really hope you have.

Ooh, right.

But what's really great about the Wu-Tang Clan is you might hear the sound and just enjoy it, which is fine, but it's an infusion of cultures, right?

It's looking at kung fu, it's looking at hip hop, it's looking at Staten Island, these worlds that people didn't think belonged together and somehow came together to create a sound that no one ever had heard of.

And that's really what influenced my work.

But coming from where I do, being a Puerto Rican who's really the first generation that wasn't born in Puerto Rico, the men weren't required to go to high school.

So both my brother and my father didn't finish high school.

So I started working in a factory when I was 13, and I was to wrap Christmas wreaths for people.

And working there for long periods of time.

You know, it made me feel like those were the limitations of my life.

And this is what I wanna put into context for everybody when you looking at the rest of my work, I come from this place where most of the people never leave the place, and they feel limited by what they see.

So if you don't inevitably become a hip hop star or an athlete, then you're not leaving.

So one of the reasons why I go around the country and talk about art and why it's important is because I want to demystify expectations both for the people that come from places like I do, but also for communities that are very different.

So just recently, I got a email from the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, which is a great organization and they take pottery clay and they take them to classes throughout the city where they don't have art classes, and they teach kids how to make pottery and they bring them back, even in juvenile detention centers and they say, "We're moving close to your old neighborhood.

You know, how do we do this in a way that the community's welcoming and that we can get more people like you to take a pottery class?"

And what it reminded me of was my first pottery class.

I didn't take a pottery class until I was 25 years old.

And I took it for very pragmatic reasons.

First day of high school, I'll give you an example of my education.

The teacher in my homeroom handed out a textbook and she said, "Write down word for word what's in this book.

So if anybody looks in this classroom, it'll look like you're doing something.

Other than that, I don't care what you do."

So imagine coming from that and then deciding to be the first to go to college.

So I remembered doing graffiti and I said, "You know, I'll take an art class."

And the teacher was a potter.

He said, "You should try the pottery wheel."

And the first time that I sat on the pottery wheel wasn't just like the normal experience that most people have.

Like, "Oh, this is fun," or "Oh, this is hard."

The thing I kept thinking about was, at some moment somebody's gonna tap me on the shoulder, say, "Excuse me, what are you doing here?"

Even before anybody said anything to me, that's the feeling I had in my gut.

So for so many artists that are different that find themselves in places where everybody looks different than them and have different background, you just automatically feel excluded.

And I'll give you a few examples of what that looks like.

But I think there's a humorous, I think it's pretty funny anecdote to this where I was in the class, and I never, like, we didn't grow up drinking tea.

You know, like in Philly you don't like just dodge bullets and go, "All right, let's have some like Earl Gray."

You know, that's not like a combination that happens quite often.

But everybody in the class, and mind you, I was the only person of color, was making teapots.

For some reason, everybody wants to make a teapot when they, it's like they know about "Ghost" and they wanna make a teapot.

Those are the two things that people associate with pottery.

And like my immediate thought was like, "How much tea are white people drinking?"

(audience laughing) You know, and like that's carried with me the entire time of me making pottery was this idea that like somehow I'm almost an ethnographer trying to unravel a culture different than my own and understand it.

And it's not for the lack of putting it down, it's more for like being curious and trying to understand where these systems come from.

Like why did I grow up where I did?

Who am I?

These like very basic questions that people have.

So when the Clay Studio reached out to me, I said, you know, "The best way to engage with people that come from where I do is to maybe set up a pottery wheel on the side of the street.

You know, no agenda.

Let's just see what happens."

(pottery wheel whirring) When you give someone like me an opportunity, you know, someone that comes from a family that works so hard, we just really put ourselves into it.

When a lot of people come.

Hey, where do you live?

From schools like mine, they pursue trades or jobs just like blue collar work, which is fine if that's like really what they want, but I think a lot of times they don't really feel like they got another option.

And just that vision of somebody that looks like them making pottery I think is a huge impact.

Studios moving here, you know, they're moving to Kensington 'cause they'll see that building and say ceramics and they'll think, "Oh that's for other people," you know, to take classes there.

But really it's for them.

By being here and showing them that people that look like them are doing it, maybe they'll just take a class.

Good job.

- Wow.

- [Roberto] Isn't that cool?

- Yes.

- You know it's good.

- All right.

- All right, there you go.

(Mimi laughs) Love that tattoo, loyalty, it's like.

- Thank you.

- All right now you.

The more we take things that many of us take for granted, like being able to take a pottery class a paint your own pottery class.

A class where you get to pretend you're Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and we just make it for everybody.

The idea is not to create a bunch of potters.

I mean that would be great, but that's not the idea.

The idea is to expand what people think that's available to them.

You know, like I'm a potter, I think I was always made to be a potter.

I would think I was always made to be an artist, but I didn't know that until I went to school for it.

And a lot of happy accidents had to happen.

A lot of people that are people just like you in this room bought my pottery at a flea market, and said, "I really like the cityscape on it."

Or "I really like that you combine graffiti with a teapot."

A lot of you were my peers who challenged the words that I was using.

A lot of people are just people around the street where I grew up from that said, "Man, what you're doing is so different."

Who knew that that would take me to places like the Cincinnati Museum of Art, where they created an entire pottery studio for people to watch me make pots for two weeks.

This is little Leo, he grew up in Cincinnati, and he once came to just to the museum and do the regular museum thing, you know, where they like have a class where you can create something, cut up a collage, and you can like have the art experience when you're at his museum as a kid.

And he saw me making pots and he loved it so much that he came the next day and he asked his mom if he could just go to the museum to see that guy make pottery again.

And what it reminded me of was Hannah Barlow.

And Hannah Barlow is the first recorded woman in England to throw pottery.

And she saw somebody throw at a fair, and little by little her work got her into Minton pottery where she got to make her own pots, and eventually wounded up finding herself in the World's Fair.

And I saw this little kid who grew up in a very different place than me, and I asked him if he could cross the threshold and I can teach him how to make pottery.

And we threw pots together.

You know, that's the idea.

I mean a lot of times people think, you know, service can be for other Black and brown people that come from where I do.

But for me, service means going to Phillips Exeter Academy.

It means going to Yale, it means going to prison.

All these places where I've given lectures to.

And it means taking those same lectures and bringing them to a juvenile detention center.

Speaking to three people in Kensington who have no experience with pottery at all.

'Cause when you cut the arts, maybe you cut the heart strings off the body that freedom rings.

If you cut the arts to fund war, what are we fighting for?

They tell us to paint houses, but not to paint a canvas.

You'd rather see us in encampments than exceeding on a campus.

Without art, how you gonna dance when you ace that math test?

Who's going to sing your praises when you get that high mark?

Without art, we're quick to draw guns or after sing war cries and dance around the issues.

You wanna stop violence, pick up some violins.

You see, 'cause those who draw good, we're the last to draw blood.

Those who throw pots, we're the last to throw shots.

So when you cut the arts baby, you cut the heart strings off the body that freedom rings.

(audience applauding) These are two little figurines.

I'm really inspired by the history of the decorative arts.

And I love me some chubby angels.

You know, like, like there's a lot of serious things in life, right?

When you look at art, there's like serious moments where you can look at a Rothko and it can make you cry, you know?

And you can look at a Frida Kahlo and you can put yourself in that exact moment where you felt like your life didn't matter or somebody broke your heart, and you just wanted to make something to express yourself.

And then there's these moments where you just like, "I just love me some little fat angels," you know, but like, how do I look at that, right, and then make something that makes sense.

So I was like, "I make ceramics, let me make some bookends."

So I made these little bookends, and they have all these patterns that represent me.

So, you know, my African ancestry, my Indigenous ancestry.

But then I think of things like this figure on the left hand side has this colorful pattern on it.

And the reason why I did that is because Biggie Smalls once had this picture of him in a Coogi sweater counting money, you know?

And that image is so burnt into my memory, right?

And I associate that pattern with being representational of where I'm from.

And I get to show, like I had my work in places like the Met, but then I go to my elementary school and it's so sweet to see this group of kids, you know, make a bunch of cutouts.

There was dozens of these cutouts of pots with pictures of their parents and their local heroes.

And just about every single day I get Instagram messages from teachers all around the country who use my work to show kids that their stories matter.

And where did this all start?

It started from an experience I had in undergraduate where for many of you who are going to school for art, you might tag a peer and say, "Hey, can you help me with an art project?"

And it might be "I just need to take a photo of you."

And someone took a photo of me and they had it in their critique, and the person's art was about the end of the world sort of an eschatology sort of study.

And someone was like, "That doesn't look like that.

It just looks like some Mexican gangster."

And you know, most of the people in the class had a good laugh.

And my friend told me about it 'cause they thought I would think it's funny.

And at first I was like, "Well, I mean I guess it's kind of funny."

I mean even though I was wearing like a Nirvana shirt, I think, and you know, I'm not sure exactly what about that says Mexican gangster, but I realized that that's how people are gonna look at me no matter what, no matter how I dress, no matter what music I play, I'm just gonna look like a Mexican gangster to them.

And I went to the school library and I saw this book on Worcester Porcelain, and for those of you who don't know Worcester Porcelain, one of the people who used to design for them came to America, Charles Fergus Binns and started Alfred University ceramics program, which is today one of the most famous ceramics programs.

So it's very influential.

And they had a portrait of the vignette.

So I came back to my studio and I tried to make the same teapot, and I put a portrait of myself on it.

I wanted to put my face in a place where I felt it didn't belong.

Who knew that years later, my studies and being infatuated with the history of the decorative arts would take me places like this pot right here is called a centennial vase.

And it was made for the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia.

It was made by Trenton Porcelain Works and designed by Carl Muller.

And it showed a hundred years of innovation in America, you know, and so I made my own century vase for Brooklyn, which is where the original century vase is exhibited.

And this one is of things that I associate Brooklyn with, like Biggie Smalls and a 50 cent food stamp.

But all these experiences that I want to share with you come out of a lived experience.

You know, I once had this poetry professor that said he hated art.

He was the only poetry class I've taken in college, is like, "Art sucks."

And he was like, "Let me tell you why."

And he said, "Because most people don't make art from what they know.

They don't make art from their lived experience.

They make art based upon what they think other people wanna see."

You know, so I was in grad school and I was throwing pottery and I was making these big pots.

And one of the things that happens with big pots is that sometimes they rub against your shirt.

And so I would come in the studio like overnight, don't tell anybody this, like three or four o'clock in the morning and I would rub slip all over my stomach, I would take off my shirt and I just looked like this, it was a scene.

So I would throw pottery without my shirt on, and I would throw these big pots and then when I would sweat and for some reason I only sweat from my head, which I know is something I should probably get checked out, but I haven't yet.

And I also said like my friend Margaret, who's in the studio next to me, she would also wear a bandana.

But I was like, "Margaret's just so cool, she's from Oklahoma, she like collects antiques.

I was like, I wanna be just like Margaret when I grow up."

And I was walking in the street, and I forgot that I was wearing this bandana and somebody was walking and they walked in the other side of the street.

Mind you, I'm five foot seven, you know, I'm not like this really intimidating person.

And I was like, "Why would the person cross the street, you know, just because I'm a little darker?"

And I realized I was wearing this bandana and they must have thought that I was a gangster, a Crip, in State College, Pennsylvania.

(audience laughing) You know, like how ludicrous is that?

So I came back and made this series of teapots inspired by that.

But like, what people don't think about, right, is you talk about being different, having different experiences, and choosing something like going to college.

But what are the added burdens?

Maybe if you don't even go to school for art, what are the added things that happen to you?

So I'm in school for ceramics, for pottery.

I make teapots and cups and things that people eat and drink out of.

But my brother who grew up in the same house, who ate most of the same food, who slept in the same bedroom, was in prison.

My brother's locked in the state pen.

I make art at Penn State.

I'm a potter, I make plates.

He in jail, he make plates.

You see, I tried to be a student, one day I got home, I opened my cupboards and all I saw was stew dent.

I turned around, I got smacked and all I did was stew then.

I thought I could join the synagogue.

But when it came to church, I just saw its walls crack by the cinder blocks and words went over my head like a cinder shop.

Being fat leaves this world disappointed, like a sentence pop.

I thought I could be a veteran.

But when it comes to war, I just saw my Pearl Jam like that veteran man gunshots keep me up late nights like Letterman, I can't be no Christian 'cause I get confused who to thank for these pots that I'm pissing in.

Listen in, 'cause now not only do I have a pot to piss in, but I can make it myself.

(audience applauding) So what does that pottery look like when you have those kinds of experiences and you choose to just make nonetheless?

You know, I'm trying to discover in my past and how I got to where I'm at.

How does someone like me from an impoverished community go to school for something like pottery?

How did that freedom exist?

And it happened during the civil rights movement.

It happened during all the people that came before me who fought for me to have those rights.

So how can I just put an image of myself on my work?

Why don't I begin paying homage to those people?

Why don't I combine all the different art forms that I've learned, take Chinese patterns that I'm inspired by, and take the kente cloth that represents my ancestry and take the Taino symbols that represent, and the graffiti I grew up drawing and put it all together.

And what does that look like?

Well, it looks like this.

And what I wanna tell everybody about is how opportunities come about.

I think a lot of times people think you have to be the greatest at something in order to achieve the things that you really want in this life.

And how many of us have imposter syndrome and feel like we're not great at anything?

I'm gonna raise my hand 'cause I feel that way.

But honestly, I think for me, my experience has been, it's not necessarily what you're great at, sometimes it's the combination of things that you're mediocre at that make you distinct.

You know, I don't have to be the greatest poet ever.

I don't have to make the best pots ever.

Sometimes it's how you combine those things that make you unique.

And years ago they were putting together an Afrofuturist period room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And interestingly enough, when I was first making pottery in my first community college class, one of the running jokes was when I would leave a room, I would tell people, "Check out my art at the Met."

You know, that was like, I would say that and people would laugh, you know, it was funny because like, "Ah, there's no way you're ever gonna be in the Met."

And one day they invited the curator, the set designer for "Black Panther" to curate Hannah Beachler, to curate the show.

And she had this idea that she dreamt about, about a potter who combines pottery with graffiti and somehow is inspired by people of color.

So she woke up in the morning and she Googled those things.

And I came up.

(audience laughing) And I didn't know how I got this opportunity, you know, I was like, I don't think I really deserve this.

There's so many in people in pottery who make things thinner than I do.

Who do portraits better than I do.

And then they came back and they said, "Mo, not only do we want you to be part of the show, but we want you to design the image that we're gonna use to promote the show."

And I was like, "What?"

So what did I do?

I hired three designers and I said, "This is what they want.

This is what they want.

This is what they want.

Can you come up with things 'cause I have to really make the best possible image.

It's the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City."

And they came up with those images and I showed them to the people.

And at the end of it, they seemed disappointed.

And I was like, "Guys like I can tell that you don't like what it is that I'm showing you."

And they were like, "We just wanted something that's more like you."

And I mean, my first thing was like, "Well what does that mean?"

But I went home that weekend and I drew on my iPad and this image I drew in about 45 minutes, this entire image here.

And I came back and I showed it to them on Monday.

And they were like, "This is exactly what we wanted."

You know, sometimes we don't see it in ourselves.

It's kind of like an accent, sometimes we can't hear our own accent.

You guys hear that?

You don't even know what's great about you until you surround yourself with people who acknowledge it and who tell you you're special.

I got this opportunity to carry a show at the University of Pennsylvania.

And what was really interesting about it is their entire collection is 300 years of portraits of white founding fathers.

And I was like, "Okay, so what do I do with that?"

I was like, "We can do a Ben Franklin show."

I was like, "Can I do graffiti over it?"

They were like, "No."

I was like, all right, cool.

So we did this show, which is like the first half is actually painted like Independence Hall, and the second half they allowed me to graffiti inside of this room.

And the middle here is the image of Ben Franklin and the other side is of my father.

And my father would ride his bike every day over the Ben Franklin Bridge to get his family to work, to get his family to be able to move out of where we were living at.

So this becomes a partition into a different part of Philadelphia.

And all these people came to see it, including my high school teacher who encouraged me to write poetry to begin with.

And there's a lot of serious moments in art, right?

But then there's these moments that are just fun.

Like through decorating all this work and putting these incredibly influential people in my work.

I've made friends with some great people like Erykah Badu, who I designed this grill for, and she's promised me a copy of my own.

But I have to go to Chinatown to like get the impressions and I just haven't made the time.

But I just think this is so fun.

Like I want a grill.

This is a bodega I did, this is Design Miami, which is the very top of the line design fair.

And I made a bodega like the one my dad used to have when I was a kid.

And I made things like, this is a pit bull umbrella stand.

You know, I know all you guys probably want one of these.

Has anybody ever heard of Della Robbia?

Della Robbia is in most museums, I feel like it's the underdog of the renaissance.

You know, Andrea della Robbia was working with terracotta and a lot of these scenes are mother and child.

But like when I think of a mother and child, I think of my mom and me, but like how no matter what I did, people would see me as a kid bound for crime.

So I put a ski mask on the baby, and my mom came to the opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

She didn't know she was featured on it, and she just had the biggest smile on her face, you know?

And one of the things that's really interesting about my experience with art is that at first my family's really like private and they were like, "What are you doing, Rob?"

You know, and then after a while they were like describing the work to other people.

And I used to be a security guard across the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I used to open doors for people for $4.25 an hour.

And I would walk over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to eat my lunch.

'Cause that's where people would hang out to like take pictures with the Rocky statue, of course.

And I never went into the museum 'cause I didn't think there was anything in there for me.

So to make work that nowadays kids walk into a museum and say to their teacher, "This is what this artwork means," to me is revolutionary.

You know, this piece right here is a cast of my body.

And to make this just process-wise, I know some of you're like, "Well, how'd you make that?"

This is made by me getting trapped in plaster and rubber for long periods of time.

So my head was trapped in plaster for two hours, and I could only breathe through a straw, and my torso for three hours and my legs for four hours.

I lost feelings in my legs.

Like if you're an artist, you have to fucking mean it.

(audience laughing) You know, I didn't know that years later this piece will be featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

And the president would use this work in a presidential order to talk about how we need to remove the idea of race from our institutions.

And it hit me that just the idea of me wanting to know where I'm from and who I am is offensive to people.

You know, just the idea of me existing, and just wanting to be a part and do things in a very traditional way.

Like this is a 20-foot tall piece that you can walk into that I also had to turn into a DJ booth 'cause you know, you gotta make it a party all the time.

And it's at Grounds for Sculpture.

And what I love about this piece is what I designed it for was for anybody who wants to, to be able to walk in and take a picture of themselves with work.

Because today when we go to museums, what do most people do when they see the "Mona Lisa"?

They take a selfie, right?

And it's considered in bad taste.

Well, you know, I understand that.

But at the same time, why do people do that?

I think people wanna do that because they wanna see themselves reflected in art.

They want their life to have meant something, which I think is just an inherent universal thing.

That's why we see the paintings in Lascaux, the cave paintings, right?

And we see paintings in Argentina make 20,000 years apart.

They didn't have Google or Instagram to connect with each other to say, "This is my art.

This is what you should be making."

People made that instinctively, inherently, we have some things about us that are drawn to art.

And you know, I have these really fun moments where I turn these things into DJ booths.

I got to teach Seth Rogan how to make pottery, which he's really fun.

He's got the same laugh, ha, ha, ha.

He does that in real life.

Erykah Badu is seriously like an actual friend of mine and she's a consummate artist.

And this is the weirdest moment in my life, y'all, like I just told you where I grew up.

So I was walking with Erykah Badu, and this is not a joke.

Somebody hands me a phone and it's Lenny Kravitz, and I'm talking with Lenny Kravitz and hanging out with Erykah Badu, and I was like, "What is happening?"

And I never seen him since, but you know, it is really great.

And then I got to make this mural of Black Thought from The Roots, which is my favorite hip hop artist.

And I got to design this alongside him.

And man, like growing up and seeing the murals in Philly and getting to design my own at the Clay Studio, which is where they teach kids in Philly, it's just like this incredible full circle moment.

And through that process I realized that like, walking around in Kensington, where I'm from, there's no public sculptures.

You know, why?

Because people don't want the things to get damaged.

They see all these people.

If you look up Kensington in Philadelphia, you will find documentaries on how horrible the situation is there.

And through all of that, we're making pots, and I'm teaching people how to make patterns, and we're using those patterns to decorate the pots.

And people are learning how to make pottery in those communities.

And it's creating this inherent memory in all these kids that I too can do that.

As part of this project, I made a kid's book telling people about my story, and how they too can be where they wanna be in life.

And I get pictures all the time of these kids throwing footballs and taking pictures of themselves with their families.

And in my studio, I'm making work that represents where I'm from and how am I doing that?

I'm thinking about things like, for example, when most of us think about pottery in orange and black, you might think of Greek pottery.

When people from where I'm from think of orange and black, we think of prison uniforms, right?

And so you take people from different places and you give them those opportunities.

They see the world from a different perspective.

And we start to pay homage to things like the March in Selma the day my sister got her chain stolen from her.

You know, this particular piece right here is called the School to Prison Pipeline.

And it's part of the permanent collection at the Carnegie Mellon or the Carnegie Museum.

And at the bottom here, we have kids waiting in school for the lunch line, because every child is innocent, right?

We have them in the middle of the life waiting in line for food stamps.

And at the top, those same kids are waiting in line in prison to get their food.

And it's just a reminder that we all start as innocent children.

And often it's our circumstances that decide where we wind up going.

You know, but not only museums get to have my work, I think about what I want to be in people's houses every day.

I look at movements like the Mingei movement in Japan by Souetsu Yanagi and Shouji Hamada who really wanted to create handmade pottery for the everyday person.

Not just the royal, not just the wealthy.

To be able to own these works.

And I make things like these are butter dishes that are also Septa trains.

I think those are pretty fun.

And then I get to make cups, handmade pottery.

This is Sonia Sanchez, which is one of my icons in pottery, in poetry.

And not only did I get to make this of her, I got to meet her and hear her say a poem in real life.

And I even got to hear a poem from someone of The Last Poets who made a poem about me.

My work has taken me across the nation.

I got to design a line of clothing for Walmart.

And what was really complicated about that was like, I know what most of you're thinking is like "Walmart?"

You know, but then you know, I was thinking about like even my cups, this handmade thing.

There's a reason why they say movements like the arts and crafts movement and the Mingei movement failed.

And it was because how can somebody actually make something handmade that everybody can afford without also already being wealthy, you know?

And if I could design something for $15 that someone anywhere, like we went to Austin City Limits last year, shout out to Austin City Limits if anybody's been there, and we saw five different people wearing my clothes in Austin City Limits, who had no idea where I'm from.

And that's really important to me as an artist, is to make things that it doesn't matter if people know where I'm from, instead they're left with what they saw.

Last thing I wanna do with you guys is I wanna share with you 10 things that I've learned since being an artist.

Number 10, watch how you make your ends.

You see 'cause cash can buy a Benz, but it can't buy friends.

And nine, look, keep your ambition in line, because if you're always looking forward, you can't buy back time.

And eight, you might have to see some hate, a lot of things that you make nobody relates.

And seven, watch out for dudes named Kevin.

That's just a joke, a lot of Kevins are cool, it's just, it rhymes with seven.

So just, bear with me here.

People come in different names, offer you big fame.

If you trust in the wrong people, that brings you big pain, and six man, you might have to take some licks, but there's a limit to that though, don't take no shit.

And five, nobody's more important than your life.

Ignoring loved ones brings you big strife.

And four, this rule you can't ignore.

Believe in yourself, man of this I'm sure, and three, this rule has gotta be key.

Being bitter is expensive.

Being kind is free.

And two, just forget everything you knew, 'cause all you know-it-alls learn nothing new.

You see, people gonna try to rank you.

Believe this my friend, it don't matter how long it takes for you to get to the end, you just keep scoring a one.

The world's gonna see you're a 10, the end.

Thank you.

(audience applauding and cheering) (audience chattering)