EL GRAN VARON, 2023

Fae Lugo is a Bronx-born, gender-queer, mixed-media artist and educator. Initially, Lugo started as a fashion stylist for the clothing brand Luar and worked in modeling, photography, and design in high school, assisting on their first New York Fashion Week show at seventeen years old. They eventually became fascinated with the sculptural aspect of clothing. Their work developed to focus more exclusively on sculptural foundations such as woodworking, glassblowing, casting, and mold-making. It is furthered by their love of writing, which tends for them to involve in-depth research and critical analysis. “My work delves specifically into the disruption caused by Black queer bodies, their sexuality, and their fullness when it comes to challenging the institutions in which they are forced to reside. The Afro-Latine experience combined with ideas [related to] respectability, craftsmanship, and therefore value, have forced the structures I create to be a direct reflection of the space in which they’re viewed. [The surfaces are] meticulously polished, providing the metaphorical institutional framework, while key details give way to a more complex narrative that is Blackness and queerness. [For instance, a] lit two- foot glass candle with clear wax [is] hidden in the back of a polished steel window, a slumped piece of off-white glass housing a sunbleached negative of a bruised eye [sits] atop a steel pedestal, and a red oak and steel washboard stands askew.”