Artists Revisit Their Bronx Walls of Fame

Rigoberto Torres was born in Puerto Rico in 1960, but he grew up in the Bronx. John Ahearn was born in 1951 in Binghamton, N.Y., and settled in the Bronx in the early ’80s by way of the downtown art scene. For over a decade, the two honed their iconic style, producing colorful, revealing life-cast reliefs of their South Bronx neighbors in open-air studio sessions, drawing crowds, making friends and making art. These days, though, Torres lives near Orlando, Fla., most of the year, and Ahearn lives in Harlem. The two still share a studio, in the Bronx, above a tire shop. Reliefs of two of the mechanics hang on the wall like their shingle.

Both artists are from the Bronx. And both aren’t. But so what? “Swagger and Tenderness” (“Arrogancia y Ternura”), the biggest survey of Ahearn and Torres since 1991, is at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It’s billed as a return of Bronx culture to the Bronx — which it is, since most of the casts on display depict Bronx residents. A good number of them came out for the private opening last Wednesday, or the public one Saturday, or both, to pose for pictures with the statue of their younger selves or put their arm around the plaster image of a loved one.

“Swagger and Tenderness” is also sold as the first major exhibition to give Ahearn and Torres equal billing, which is also true, but a trickier claim. The Bronx reliefs are a powerful and complex body of work, rightly canonized, while the two men who make them equally have found different kinds of success.

The story of their partnership, retold in catalogs and profiles down the years, goes like this: In 1979, Ahearn had set up at Fashion Moda, the avant Bronx gallery (1978-93), casting volunteers’ heads in plaster and hanging them on the wall. Torres came to check it out and never left. Ahearn, with an art history background and a hunger for authenticity, got there first; but Torres, with his experience working in a factory for Botanica statuettes and his entree into Spanish-speaking society, took their collaboration to the next level: He convinced Ahearn to call the Bronx home.

By 1991, Ahearn was famous. Torres was doing all right too, with a solo show in Spain — his first. Then Percent for Art commissioned Ahearn (not Torres) to create three sculptures for a traffic triangle near the 44th Precinct in the South Bronx. He decided to put Bronx residents on pedestals: “Raymond and Toby,” a man in a hoodie with his dog; “Corey,” a shirtless guy with a basketball, standing on a boombox; a girl named Daleesha on roller skates. When the bronzes were finally installed in 1992, the backlash was immediate. To their detractors, Raymond looked like a drug dealer, Corey looked lazy, Daleesha looked underfed. The New York Post railed against public money funding “anti-black” art, and quoted a cop calling the sculptures “unbelievable.” In Artforum, the critic Glenn O’Brien retorted: “Perhaps what makes these works politically incorrect is not that they are unbelievable but that they are, in fact, very believable.”

Maybe Spike Lee could get away with a boombox but not a white artist like Ahearn (an earlier fiberglass version of “Corey” has him standing on a small staircase instead). Maybe Torres’s name could have softened the charges of pandering to stereotypes. But it was Ahearn’s commission. Rather than fight his neighbors, he removed the bronzes after less than a week, and his career quieted.

Fast forward 30 years. “We wanted to uplift joy,” said Ron Kavanaugh, a Bronx resident, activist and one of the show’s two curators. “We didn’t want to mimic that era when a lot of the sculptures were being created,” the era when the Bronx was Burning — especially on the news. Judging from the work on view, that means nobody who looks too strung out, nobody smoking. No “Rat Killers,” no “Luis with Bite in Forehead.” Versions of “Corey” and “Raymond and Toby” are here, but not a reference to the controversy their images provoked — not the reason this is Ahearn and Torres’s first big survey since 1991 — not the reason their history rhymes with now.

There are two ways to see “Swagger and Tenderness.” One is joyful. The exhibition is a little too rosy to succeed as art history, although many hits are here — instead it offers broadly legible, life-affirming sculpture that fulfills a basic need to see yourself in art. The other view is critical — a picture of an institution navigating a changing world, stumbling over itself to show how progressive and community-minded it is. They’re two sides of the same face.

The public opening on Saturday afternoon drew a diverse, enthusiastic crowd: grandparents and parents and babes in arms. The exhibition includes a domino table with the Puerto Rican flag design and an instruction to “please touch.” It was always busy, and so was the pale blue couch by the skelly board, although the only person I saw playing skelly was Willie, whose powdery, proud-looking bust hung across the room. Ahearn’s twin brother, Charlie Ahearn, darted through the crowd wearing a “Wild Style” trucker hat, schwag from the 1983 hip-hop movie he directed that took Bronx culture mainstream.

I met Eric and Megan Rivera. They hadn’t been to the museum in at least 10 years, but Megan recognized real people, “real history” in the show. Mashell Black worked on the installation. “I was skeptical of the blue when I was applying it,” he said of the cerulean walls, “but now that I’ve seen it, I think it makes the portraits a little bit more intimate.” Each relief has a spotlight. “I think they would’ve been lost in all the white.”

Michael Weathers, a baritone who befriended the two artists in 1980, sang a cappella verses of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” His portrait with his father hangs in the museum. Every cast has a story. When the galleries of eye-level reliefs are full of people, the flesh and plaster heads intermingle, and it feels like, if you start telling stories, you might not stop.

The Bronx Museum brought in an independent curator, Amy Rosenblum-Martín, to organize the Ahearn-Torres show. She, in turn, brought in the Bronx writer Kavanaugh, who remembers seeing “Double Dutch,” a 1982 mural of four Bronx girls jumping rope that might be Ahearn and Torres’s most famous. “Swagger and Tenderness,” like every Bronx Museum show, had input from a group of community advisers, including Moises Rivera, their longtime head of security.

The museum clearly cares for the neighborhoods it serves. It’s also understandably wary of charges of aloofness, appropriation and exploitation at a time when, more than any point since the ’90s, museums are on political eggshells.

In 2016 the Bronx Museum endured the public departure of two trustees who objected to then-director Holly Block’s measured but activist approach. Block passed away in 2017, but her ideas — community outreach, free admission — still resonate there. With fanfare, the Bronx Museum hired Jasmine Wahi as the first Holly Block social justice curator in February 2020.

Then, Covid. Last December, Wahi resigned. Pressed for comment, the museum’s executive director, Klaudio Rodriguez, offered that “timelines and deliverables were altered and her tenure was interrupted” by the pandemic, and while the museum remains grateful for the two exhibitions Wahi mounted, they could not agree on an extended contract. On Instagram, the curator chalked up her resignation to “a variety of reasons,” signing the post: “A Cultural Worker who believes that Social Justice and Equity work needs to involve actively dismantling WSCP [White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy] structures and engage every aspect of an institution.”

Against this background, “Swagger and Tenderness” headlines the museum’s 50th anniversary, along with a capital campaign for a renovated south wing. The redesign will put the entrance, currently tucked behind a bus stop in the middle of the block, back on the corner of 165th Street and the Grand Concourse, where it feels like it should be. They’re lining up public programs, like a double-Dutch competition on Nov. 12.

Maps at the front desk direct visitors to the three remaining Ahearn/Torres murals in the East Bronx, including Double Dutch, clustered around Longwood Avenue. It’s not on the map, but a few blocks north of the museum is the 44th Precinct, where a wiry tree and a memorial for slain officers now occupy the triangle. A couple of blocks further up is the brick Walton Avenue apartment building where Ahearn and Torres hung some of their first casts. You can still see the nails.

Ahearn likes to cite art history in his sculptures; his figures descend a staircase or wear a pearl earring. He’s liberal about color — he’ll shade your forehead purple and your hands green. Torres favors the bold, unmottled paintjobs and airbrushed details of Botanica statuettes. His specialty, unfurled in “Swagger and Tenderness,” are dynamic props and situations, like the fortune teller leaning out of the wall around a lit-up crystal ball (she was there on Saturday) or the baker balancing a trayful of doughnuts in each hand, paused mid-stride.

It’s not for me to untangle the provenance of each of the 57 or so sculptures in the show. Some of the casts have multiple versions — unique color schemes. Maybe Ahearn made one version on his own, but Torres helped paint another. The artists have their own way of crediting their joint projects. Taking their lead, the Bronx Museum wall labels are precise.

A few attributions have changed over the years. The “Raymond and Toby” on view in the Bronx, from 1991, is now listed as a joint effort, while a 1986 version in their last survey just said Ahearn. “Michael Wilson greeting his father” was an Ahearn solo act in 1993 — and is still labeled that way on gallery websites — but it says “with Torres” at the Bronx Museum. The curators seem willing to err in that direction.

As for the galleries, if anything, they tend to err toward Ahearn. Both Charlie James in Los Angeles and Alexander and Bonin in New York show and sell Ahearn and Torres collaborations and solo projects. But James only represents Ahearn. Alexander and Bonin, Ahearn’s New York dealers, have represented Torres informally for years but as of Oct. 27, Torres wasn’t listed as an artist on their website. When I asked why, they added him. “It was about time to make it official,” said Carolyn Alexander, one of the owners.

Ahearn and Torres’s current Bronx studio is their second above a tire shop. Before that was a warehouse in the Bronx, where they landed after being pushed out of an East Harlem space. In the old days they set up on the sidewalk in front of their building.

I asked how they felt about the museum’s notion that Torres has been overlooked. Ahearn tapped the cover of the catalog for “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” their 1991 survey in Houston. “What do you read right there?”

It says John Ahearn / Rigoberto Torres. And yet, he agrees, Torres deserves a boost. The Houston catalog’s foreword begins: “This exhibition celebrates the body of work John Ahearn has made in collaboration with Rigoberto Torres…”

“I invited John to go and live on Walton Avenue, and we were working together,” Torres said. “After that, I decided to go to Puerto Rico and see if I could do this on my own. I was trying to become who I really was, you know, become an artist. And they understood. But I was not really from Puerto Rico. I was a New Yorker.”

Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits by John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres

Through April 30, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org.