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Robert
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Born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents, Pugh wanted to be a pioneer in industrial design, a field in which black people were not well represented. He graduated from the Newark School of Fine Industrial Arts in 1947, and went on to design items including radios and razor blade dispensers. Later, he worked for five years at Domenick DeNegris Inc., a monument company in the Bronx before he decided to open his own monument business on 110th Street and Central Park West in 1955. In 1962, he bought Edward M. Bleser Monuments in East New York, and moved his business to its current location. Pugh turned the day-to-day operations to his daughter Lori after suffering a stroke in 1991. "When I got sick, I asked myself what life was all about," he says. He converted to Buddhism after he took up meditation following a heart attack in 1976. Now at 73, he commutes from his home in the Bronx occasionally to check on the business. He attributes his success to his family's support, and pointing to his wife, Barbara, "the woman behind me." He has made memorials celebrating many other prominent African-Americans, including a bust of Martin Luther King displayed in Harlem and a gravestone for playwright Lorraine Hansberry. He also created living memorials to the Rev. Dr. Benjamin J. Lowry of the Zion Baptist Church and Roy Wilkins, a former executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Pugh keeps his designs simple, relying on geometric shapes and the natural textures of the stones to convey feelings. "I use the grain to show the power, the motion," he says. "I try to use the material to show the emotion of what I'm trying to say." The tribute to Roy Wilkins features a flat, circular stone with a rising sun on its upper half. Three narrow black bars divide the border on the left and right edges into two equal signs. But for Pugh, this memorial symbolizes not only the memory of a great person, but the hopes of all people. "I believe that in life, you can make a change, and that's what I try to do spritually," he says. "The sun shines on all people." |
-Robert Pugh |
