Design Miami 2019
Design Miami 2019
DECEMBER 3, 2019 THROUGH DECEMBER 8, 2019
MIAMI BEACH – Wexler Gallery will be presenting a Curio booth at Design Miami this year featuring a solo project by Roberto Lugo.
Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story is an immersive installation by Roberto Lugo that seamlessly fuses high design, graffiti, hip hop, craft history, pop culture, and porcelain. Presented by Wexler Gallery, the installation will be featured in a solo Curio at Design Miami 2019. Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story consists of two large-scale funerary urns, a ceramic teddy bear, and graffiti-inspired wallpaper which evokes the make-shift memorials for victims of gun violence often found on the sidewalks in the kinds of neighborhoods in which Lugo was raised. Lugo’s choice of materials and embellished designs are rich in associations with high society and the social elite; however, the imagery is grounded in his personal experience and represents voices that have often been overlooked and underrepresented. Able to last thousands of years, his porcelain objects are intended to archive the narrative of his community.
Roberto Lugo is an emerging artist, activist, poet, and educator based in Philadelphia. Having grown up in Kensington, a neighborhood infamous for extreme poverty and inequality, Lugo’s approach to artwork is informed by graffiti and hip hop. Drawing from many disciplines and conventions, he uses his knowledge of craft history to create sculptural mash-ups that combine seemingly incongruous cultures into a single tradition. His work speaks to both an art-educated and mainstream audience.
Curio is Design Miami’s exhibition platform which invites designers, curators, innovators and gallerists to present cabinets of curiosity throughout the fair. The program spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and emphasizes surprising installations of scientific and technological research alongside handcraft and creative production. The Curios are interspersed amongst Design Miami’s core galleries, infusing the fair’s exhibition program with inventive snapshots of today’s design landscape.