2021 Jurors

Roberto Lugo, Margaret Kinkeade, & Brooks Oliver

Robert Lugo

Roberto Lugo is an American artist, ceramicist, social activist, spoken word poet, and educator. Lugo uses porcelain as his medium of choice, illuminating its aristocratic surface with imagery of poverty, inequality, and social and racial injustice.

Lugo’s works are multicultural mash-ups, traditional European and Asian porcelain forms and techniques reimagined with a 21st-century street sensibility. Their hand-painted surfaces feature classic decorative patterns and motifs combined with elements of modern urban graffiti and portraits of individuals whose faces are historically absent on this type of luxury item – people like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Cornel West, and The Notorious BIG, as well as Lugo’s family members and, very often, himself.

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 Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others.

Lugo is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently including a 2019 Pew Fellowship, a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize, and a US Artist Award. 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, Walters Museum, and more. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Learn more about Lugo on his website: www.robertlugostudio.com

Margaret Kinkeade

Margaret Kinkeade is a studio artist that focuses on the domestic object as souvenir, the collection as identity and community connection through shared work. Her research often focuses on American folk art and traditional craft especially those objects and methods historically utilized by women.

Kinkeade received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Oklahoma and she earned her MFA in ceramics from Penn State University. She currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri teaching workshops and is an adjunct instructor in ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute. Learn more about Kinkeade on her website: www.margaretkinkeade.com

Brooks Oliver

Brooks Oliver is a ceramics instructor and Program Coordinator at the University of North Texas and a studio artist based out of Dallas, TX. He recently completed a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. 

He received his MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, his BFA at Southern Methodist University, and completed his post baccalaureate studies at Syracuse University.  He taught in Jindezhen, China in 2016 with West Virginia University and regularly teaches workshops in and out of university settings. Learn more about Oliver on his website: www.brooksoliver.com