Seeing "The South Bronx Portraits" by John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
I went to the first major survey of sculpture artist-duo John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres since 1991, and got a peek of their 4-decades of collaboration.
I bought a 1996 exhibition catalogue featuring downtown artists last week, and while paying, an employee said, “You’re really into these old times. You gotta get with the new times.” I understood it was a joke, and that it was laughing at my almost hyper-fixation on a sort-of second degree nostalgia, infected by my parents who moved into our neighborhood in the late 1970s. It’s often hard to justify why I’m so interested in collecting, archiving, photographing, treasuring, and sentimentalizing any ephemera that records businesses, culture, and everyday life of the past. But, I think Binghamton, NY born artist John Ahearn (twin brother of graffiti and hip-hop film Wild Style (1983) director Charlie Ahearn) & Puerto Rican artist Rigoberto Torres’s current exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts makes that justification.
Before the Bronx Museum show, I had never seen either artist’s work in person. I first encountered their names in Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects (1987) where Sternfeld photographed a set of Ahearn & Torres’s sculptures on a building in the Bronx. The sculptures stood out immediately to me; representation of the everyday person, one’s neighbor. They elevated and ultimately historicized local existence and life— and for some, continue to in fifty years where they remain today glued to the exterior walls of South Bronx apartment buildings. They held on to the faces of their community.
Taking the 6 train up to 138th Street and 3rd Avenue, and walking up to 165th Street and Grand Concourse, I found myself surrounded in two large rooms of crystalized South Bronx faces.
The new show— curated by Ron Kavanaugh & Amy Rosenblum-Martin— Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits is the first major survey of the sculpting duo since the 1991 show, South Bronx Hall of Fame: Sculpture by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston— Catalogue scan is linked here.
To preface the show, I refer to co-curator Rosenblum-Martin’s wall text in which she references Urban Legends: the South Bronx in Representation and Ruin (Harvard University Press, 2020) author and my former professor Peter L’Official:
Ahearn’s … partnership with the then seventeen-year-old high school Torres was born out of the teen seeing Ahearn’s work and recognizing a relationship with his uncle’s Bronx statuary company, which produced religious figures for local botanica shops. Indeed, Ahearn’s “South Bronx Hall of Fame” show, whose audience featured many of the African American and Latinx subjects cast by the artist for his painted, lifelike mascarilla (or face mask) statuary, had the effect of transforming the storefront art space into a reliquary for still-living saints for all the community to see.
The exhibit begins with a sculpture of professor, community organizer and artist Shellyne Rodriguez— who currently has her first solo exhibit Third World Mixtapes: The Infrastructure of Feeling with P.P.O.W. Gallery in Tribeca, on view through April 22nd— thank you Hayley for letting me know!
Rodriguez’s accompanying wall text and quote reads like a manifesto for understanding the exhibit to which the viewer is about to enter— to not forget about Torres’s influence, role, and individual practice:
When I was in grad school, there was a kind of coming home that was happening. In my thesis, I was looking at my own personal history and what really resonated with me was that Rigo not only was from the Bronx, but his uncle had a sculpture warehouse, which produced statues for botanicas, and that felt like a root. When John originally asked me to be cast, I told him I didn’t want him to case me by himself. I felt like it was important to bring in the Puerto Rican artist from the Bronx that gets obscured. John himself as an artist is great, and he’s seen in the neighborhood, but the structure of the art world mimics racist and colonial tropes that would render the “native” invisible, making the “settler” the expert interpreter of those people in the Bronx, to quote Linda Thiwai Smith. They would relegate Rigo as an artist’s assistant to John when there’s an equal playing power there.
I stumbled across a late 1990s New York City group show catalogue featuring the South Bronx portrait sculptures. The catalogue included one or two behind-the-scenes images of Ahearn & Torres climbing ladders to install the sculptures on the very building Sternfeld later photographed. It described what I had admired about their work from seeing it in Sternfeld’s picture— that the sculptures were a sort of community performance. There was the unmistakeable fact— with the behind-the-scenes imagery or not— that Ahearn & Torres were physically installing their work in the public space, and that entailed a full spectrum of labor that came from climbing ladders and collaborating with neighbors. The Bronx Museum’s exhibit extends this invitation into the duo’s process with a vitrine of photographs taken by documentary photographers like Martha Cooper and the community of the duo in action, casting neighbors on a table at a block party for example. Other items included Polaroids taken by Ahearn & Torres that were used as reference when painting the blank sculptures.
The grouping of sculptures within two large rooms with navy blue painted walls appeared like as a Presidential portrait show where each individual held their own thinking space. Where most of the sculptures against the wall showed a figure’s head and upper-chest, full body sculptures stood throughout the floor.
The sculpture above was accompanied with the following quote from Torres:
I had a [teacher] named Mr. Soto, who said, “I know you’re good with your hands, and I got some dominos here.” Because everybody used to play dominoes, I said, “Where’s the box to put the dominos in?” and I made a box for them. And he goes, “You’re gonna be somebody who’s good with their hands.” And this is the reason why I’m good with my hands— I see something, and I want to create or build something or whatever so I can stay busy and occupy my mind. To be able not to give up and see something that’s not there and you’re going to make it happen is that most wonderful feeling that I get inside. Then when I’m finished, I go, well, it was no where, it was nothing, it was zero, and look what I accomplished. I used to go to bed every day. What did I learn today?
I [started] working with my Uncle Raúl [owner of C&R Statuary Corp.], doing sculptures and molds. After that, I also worked with my other uncle, Tito, at his liquor store on Chambers Street, delivering liquor to lawyers and stuff like that. I was also working at a pizza shop on Canal Street, just trying to make money, trying to figure out what direction to go in. My cousin David drove by 148th Street and Third Avenue in the Bronx and met John [Ahearn] at Fashion Moda. David told John he knew somebody good with his hands— and that was me. So he introduced me to John. I was still working with my uncles, but John asked me to work with him, and it was OK with my uncles. I was working kind of late and doing the same thing all over again. Finally, a couple months went by, and I said to John, “Why don’t you move to the Bronx? It’ll be a lot easier.” And he moved to 170th Street and Walton Avenue. Then, together, we started casting in the Longwood section of the Bronx— Dawson St., Kelly St., and Fox St.
Music played at one end of the gallery surrounded by three full-sized sculptures of musicians made by Torres. Audio echoed from the other end from a box television with looped videos of Ahearn & Torres in action with their community (I could only find one of the videos online, linked above— the one below is recorded from my phone featuring Torres and his Uncle Raúl with no words exchanged). The TV sat sandwiched between a photograph of a couple with their gifted sculpture (as the tradition went with Ahearn & Torres who would gift the casted people with a sculpture of themselves) and the sculpture itself.
Before my visit, I read critic Hilton Als’s feature of the exhibit in the New Yorker. He highlighted the underground and ultimately, ambitious culture manifesting during Ahearn and Torres’s collaboration. He spoke about the iconic Times Square Show in June, 1980 organized by Colab— where Ahearn exhibited. Als spoke of the late, great visual artist Barbara Ess’s Just Another Asshole publication / zine which ran from ‘78 to ‘87 featuring the likes of Richard Hell, Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and so on. For Als, the Times Square Show & Just Another Asshole represented a moment in time when you left your apartment door, and by the mere fact that you left your apartment, you would snowball into arriving something spectacular at night. On the way to some destination, you found yourself somewhere else bizarre.
Ahearn and Torres’s exhibit is both a destination and detour into somewhere else. In the on-going four decades they’ve collaborated, they’ve casted a variety of people from kids to musicians to bakers to graffiti artists to couples to parents, and more. Each casted sculpture represents a formed relationship and friendship between the artist duo and their neighbor. In that, each sculpture could contain its own exhibition. On my Sunday visit, early in the afternoon, the large rooms seemed quiet with no one besides myself and the security guards walking around, but one could not avoid the soundless stories coming from the sculptures on the wall and throughout the floor. Each face proclaimed its existence in its own electrifying silence, radiating the same breath that filled their casts and molds thirty, forty years ago.
Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits by John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through Sunday, 4/30.