James Fuentes is honored to present Bronx Figures, an exhibition surveying the iconic freestanding works of long-term collaborators John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres. These affectionate portrayals of the city’s ordinary people began on the sidewalk when, in 1979, Ahearn set up shop to life-cast passersby at the storefront of Fashion Moda, the storied South Bronx art gallery run by Stefan Eins, Joe Lewis, and William Scott. It was there that Ahearn would also meet Rigoberto Torres, a Puerto-Rican born, Bronx raised artist whose experience in casting began in his uncle’s botanica statuette factory. Bronx Figures brings together a group of ambitious, in-the-round works spanning the 1980s to today, which have made a lasting impression on New York City’s public spaces as much as its art history.
For over forty years, Ahearn has established a career rooted in social practice and community building in the Bronx—where he currently works from a studio just above a tire shop. When he first arrived in New York at the end of the 1970s with his twin brother Charlie, Ahearn quickly became a fixture of the downtown punk scene. At the time living in the East Village, he was a founding member of Collaborative Projects Inc. (a.k.a. Colab), a radical artists’ collective responding to contemporary politics and economics in the city. On New Year’s Eve in 1979, Colab staged the iconoclastic Real Estate Show at 123 Delancey Street—later restaged in 2014 at James Fuentes’ 55 Delancey Street location. During this time, Ahearn was drawn to the material and process of face casting, which necessitated a social environment and resulted in an intimate realism. In 1979, he organized that first public molding session in an impromptu set up at Fashion Moda, making plaster casts of curious volunteers from the surrounding Bronx community.
From the moment he met Torres—taking a polaroid of him outside the gallery—Ahearn intuited that he had found a lifelong collaborator, a creative “other half.” Though coming from disparate upbringings and contexts, together they formed a shared creative practice and established a studio together nearby. While their casting work was completely collaborative, the artists remained singular in their painting styles—Ahearn with a loose, impressionistic hand, and Torres with a precise, saturated palette. Examples of each can be found in Bronx Figures. The artists’ process has endured over many years, using their practice to build meaningful relationships with their subjects and in dialogue with the places they represent. Ahearn and Torres have continued to create molded sculptures in communities around the world, including site-specific installations in Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and Brazil. In New York, they created the South Bronx Bronzes series, first commissioned by the 44th Police Precinct in the Bronx, later relocated to Socrates Sculpture Park, and most recently seen in the artists’ career survey at the Bronx Museum (2022–2023).
On view, Corey (1988) and Dalisha (1991/2020) represent the first studies for two of the South Bronx Bronzes. The only wall-hung relief in the exhibition, Raúl with Bust of Ruth Fernandez, presents a double-portrait of Torres’ uncle from whom he learned the craft, Raúl Arce, reverentially cradling a “marble” bust of Puerto Rican icon and singer-politician Ruth Fernández. A version of this same work was exhibited in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body in 2018—posing both a commentary on and tribute to the role of the sculptor in modern life, and within a community. In 2017, James Fuentes commissioned the artists to create Delancey Street, a series featuring cherished downtown community members on the occasion of the gallery’s ten-year anniversary. The work was reinstalled for the gallery’s final exhibition at 55 Delancey Street in May 2024. Unified in their devotion to preserving and celebrating the rich history of New York City and its local art communities, it is with great excitement that James Fuentes welcomes Ahearn and Torres to the gallery’s exhibition program.
