Roberto Lugo

This vase depicts eight Black lives lost through the systemic violence of white supremacy: Mike Brown, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling, and Emmett Till. Tragedies like these, which have continued since this piece was made, spurred the global Black Lives Matter movement, which protests racially motivated violence and discrimination.

Lugo wrote an essay about this work in issue 11 of the RISD Museum journal Manual, published in Fall 2018, saying:
Ceramics has the distinction of being a material that anthropologists use to tell us about what people were like thousands of years ago—it has the potential to keep the conversation going about these lost lives. It makes us account for the existence of people who are gone, and denies us the ability to forget about them. A Century of Black Lives Mattering presents the faces of some of the many people who have suffered from police brutality. I hope it will allow us to think about these lives for centuries to come.