Cathleen Luo (they) is an artist and art educator based in New York, working primarily in ceramics and installation. They received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University and currently work as a museum educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Luo’s practice integrates their pedagogy of radical care with sculptural processes, centering connection, touch, and modern spirituality through participatory encounters with meditative ceramic figures.

Their work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Field Projects in New York City, and the Every Woman Biennial at Pen + Brush Gallery in New York. In 2024,  Luo was awarded the Asian American Arts Alliance’s What Can We Do Grant to lead community-based arts programming in Manhattan’s Chinatown during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Additional support includes The Color Network Studio Grant, the SICK Magazine Grant for Disabled Sculptors, and CERF+’s Get Ready Grant.

In 2025, Luo was selected to participate in the inaugural Powerhouse Arts’ Artist Subsidy Program, producing large-scale ceramic works with the support of a fabrication team.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was always making art and writing growing up, but I expected to study science in college. I’ve always loved science for its methodical way of understanding the world, but over time I realized it wasn’t asking all the questions I cared about and often cut out variables it couldn’t understand, often the most human ones. It often searched for an approximate right answer, while I was becoming more interested in ambiguity, spirituality, and the emotional realities of being human.

The pandemic became a turning point. Like many people, I was forced to ask myself what mattered most, and I realized I wanted to use art as a way of investigating lived and spiritual experience. I ended up declaring my majors as Visual Arts and Creative Writing late into college, while filling my electives with philosophy, religion, literature, and social theory. What I appreciated most wasn’t just the subject matter, but that those disciplines gave me permission to slow down. 

I found museum education through teaching in schools in Harlem and the Bronx, where I saw firsthand how arts education is often the first thing to disappear from under-resourced schools. That experience led me into community programming and eventually accessibility work in museums, where I also began reckoning with my own disability. Today, my work as a museum educator is inseparable from my work as an artist. I don’t really distinguish between the two. Both are ways of helping people look more closely, ask deeper questions, and build empathy through shared experiences.

How do you stay inspired and motivated to create new work?

For many people, starting a new project feels like labor, but for me it’s compulsive. My mind constantly dreams and analyzes, and ponderings become manifestations of whatever I’m meditating on: envy, nonchalance, tenderness, protection, or a particular pose, gesture, or mannerism I want to capture.

These gestures often begin with things I see around me: a hand half raised, a slight turn of the head, or an exaggerated pose. A quick and snappy moment quickly transforms into an idea to be sat on and thought about, memorialized in the stillness of sculpture. So much can be conveyed in one slight movement. There are so many of these frozen moments living in my head that I don’t think I’ll ever run out of figures to make.

I don’t actively look for inspiration. It’s only in retrospect that I recognize why I’ve become obsessed with a certain gesture, object, or feeling, and what thread connects one body of work to the next. I often supplement my ideas with reading, mostly surrealist fiction or histories of Buddhism or Asia.

While I’m increasingly incorporating historical research as my work reflects on my family’s migration to America, my ideas rarely begin with books or archives. They begin with half-memories, observations, offhand comments, and passing thoughts that linger until they demand a physical form.

My motivation to make comes from an almost irresistible need to materialize my thoughts. I hope that when people encounter my work, they recognize something of themselves in it. My sculptures are my mirrors and of those like me, validating a specific way of moving through and experiencing the world.

Your practice focuses on ceramics and installation. What first drew you to these mediums?

I actually came to ceramics by accident. I needed to fulfill a requirement during my last year of college, and up until then I had been primarily a figurative painter. As someone with low vision, I was drawn to color, smooth surfaces, and crisp forms with saturated gradients, but I always struggled to finish paintings the way I envisioned, unable to clean up the small details. Looking back, ceramics feels obvious in its tactile quality. People had long described my paintings as sculptural, and to have finally found a medium that allows me to prioritize touch rather than sight.

The move toward installation happened just as naturally. I never liked the idea of my sculptures sitting on white pedestals. They are deities, companions, and beloved objects that deserve beautiful places to live. They are meant to hold space for reflection, so I wanted to create environments where people could spend time with them rather than simply observe them.

The word “installation” almost feels too formal for what I’m trying to do. I’m really interested in creating spaces that feel welcoming and human, through altar-like displays, seating, textiles, and other domestic elements that invite people to gather. As a community organizer and museum educator, I think a lot about how art can facilitate encounters between people. Projects like Dinner Party as Revolution, where visitors shared a meal around my sculptures, are examples of the kinds of contemporary rituals I want to create, spaces where people can reflect, connect, and experience a sense of belonging in an era defined by social alienation.

My work as a museum educator has deeply influenced this approach. Some of my favorite programs to lead are accessible touch tours for blind and low vision visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through their Access Programs, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about how sacred and everyday objects enter museums and become separated from the communities that originally used them. Once behind glass or placed on pedestals, they can become distant or exoticized, rather than remaining part of lived ritual.

That has made me think carefully about the kinds of objects I want to make. I want my sculptures to return to people. They are not meant to be above us, but to be versions of us. Touch, conversation, and gathering are central to the work because I believe art belongs in daily life. As traditional forms of spirituality continue to shift, I’m interested in creating spaces that offer another kind of spiritual home—places where people can feel safe, cared for, and connected to one another.

How do you balance control and unpredictability when working with clay?

I think people often describe ceramics as a constant battle with the material—that the clay dries too fast, slumps, cracks, or in worst case scenario, explodes in the kiln. I’ve never really related to that mindset. My expectations and I are good friends.

I’m a deeply imperfect person, and many would describe me as messy. My work reflects that. Rather than trying to force clay into perfection, I’ve learned to let it carry evidence of the life it has lived, and reflecting the hands of the person who collaborated with the material. The sculptures I admire most in museums feel wise because they bear the marks of time, repair, and survival. Though my works’ history is much shorter, it still feels like an honest reflection of the process and myself as an artist.

Working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has also changed the way I think about making. Spending time with conservators and seeing how objects are cared for over centuries has made me realize that breakage isn’t the end of a sculpture.As my practice expands beyond ceramics into sculpture more broadly, I’ve come to enjoy repair as a creative process in itself, using epoxies, resins, and reconstruction to push a material beyond its limits.

I don’t expect myself to make pristine, production-potter ceramics. My hand is visible in the work, and my hands are always a little messy. I let my pieces do what they need to do, which sometimes means slipping out of my hands.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

I want people to think. Not necessarily in the way I think, but to begin to be changed in observing their own reactions. I often think of the word Recognition and the Law of recognition and the experience of seeing yourself in something or someone else. It is a powerful feeling, especially in a society defined by and split by difference. 

To learn is not always to absorb new information but to realize something has always been there. For some people, recognition comes easily. Others may initially be unsettled by the strangeness of the bodies or their unconventional beauty. I hope that discomfort becomes an invitation rather than a barrier—an opportunity to question why certain forms feel unfamiliar and what our ideas of beauty, humanity, or spirituality are rooted in.

Others will feel shocked by their strangeness, and I hope they interrogate that discomfort. I hope my pieces push people to reflect on the concepts my sculptures represent. The discomfort is of being approached with alternative ideas of moving through the world is important. I hope that discomfort becomes an invitation rather than a barrier—an opportunity to question why certain forms feel unfamiliar and what our ideas of beauty, humanity, or spirituality are rooted in.

Each sculpture begins as a meditation on a particular question or emotional state: humility, ecstasy, protection, grief. Their gestures are intentional. The way a shoulder slumps, a hand reaches, or a body folds into itself all become ways of thinking through those ideas without words. I hope people spend time with those gestures and allow themselves to wonder.

Ultimately, though, my work isn’t just about the relationship between a person and my sculpture, it’s about the relationships that form them My work as a museum educator centers on using art as a rool to build empathy through shared observation and storytelling. I bring that same pedagogy into my installations, designing spaces that encourage conversation, touch, and communal reflection. If someone leaves not only seeing themselves a little more clearly, but also feeling more connected to the people experiencing the work beside them, then I feel the sculpture has done its job.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

Right now I’m experimenting with atmospheric firings and building larger, more iterative bodies of work. I’m becoming less interested in making a single deity and more interested in creating entire pantheons—groups of figures that exist in relationship to one another.

I’ve always joked that I was going to make larger sculptures, even though monumental scale can feel like such a stereotypically “man artist” ambition. But I’ve realized that what I’m actually after isn’t bigness for its own sake. I’m interested in what scale allows. A room full of deities creates an entirely different experience than a single figure. It begins to feel like a temple—a space dedicated to meditation, gathering, and reflection.

Looking ahead, I want to continue expanding both the physical scale of my work and the social scale of it. I’m imagining installations that become places people return to, activated through communal meals, performances, touch, and other contemporary rituals. My hope is to keep building spaces where sculpture isn’t just something to look at, but something people live with, gather around, and find themselves reflected in.

Text & photo courtesy of Cathleen Luo

Website: https://cathleenluo.myportfolio.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catluo27.art/