John Ahearn life casting at Fashion Moda, image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York
It’s 1979 in the South Bronx. In the window of Fashion Moda, a community-minded alternative art space, sculptor John Ahearn is drawing crowds with his practice of life-casting people from the neighborhood. Local resident Rigoberto Torres makes his way to the front of the line. Still in high school, he has grown up helping his uncle mold and cast religious statues. A partnership is born.
It took no more than half an hour for them to shift from artist and model to collaborators, Ahearn and Torres tell me, 45 years later, in an interview in their Bronx studio off Grand Concourse, above Marwa Tire Shop. Their finished and unfinished portrait sculptures adorn the walls like everyday saints. The conversation pours out like plaster, covering decades of collaboration and friendship, art-historical antecedents ranging from ancient classical sculpture to Duane Hanson and George Segal, and, most importantly, the generations of Bronx locals they have immortalized from childhood. Theirs are the faces that will be front and center of Salon 94’s presentation at this year’s Independent 20th Century.
John Ahearn (right) and Rigoberto Torres (left) at the opening of their exhibition Walton Ave & Friends, at Salon 94, New York, June 2024. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
Hunter Braithwaite: Tell me about the neighborhood.
Rigoberto Torres: I was born in Puerto Rico, but I grew up in the Bronx on 135th and Willis Avenue. I met John in 1979. He was doing this kind of work out of Fashion Moda. That was on 148th, a couple of blocks down that way. Everybody was watching [the life casting], people were watching from the street. Sometimes they wanted to volunteer. “Can I try this? I want to do it.” And then you talk to the person and that person becomes a member of the team.
John Ahearn: And then Walton Avenue. I like to say that Rigoberto invented Walton Avenue. When we were working at Fashion Moda, he took his materials out there. We weren’t anywhere near Fashion Moda or anybody that knew anything about me or art or casting. He was doing it with the neighborhood and everybody’s like, this is great.
HB: Collaboration is such an important element here—between you guys, with the neighborhood, with the models.
RT: The model gives a lot.
Rigoberto Torres, Myra, 1980, Acrylic on plaster, 16 x 14 1/2 x 6 inches (40.6 x 36.8 x 15.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
HB: Models like Myra, over there on the wall. Who is she?
JA: Of all of the pieces [in the studio] this is by far the earliest, from the year immediately following our first year at Fashion Moda. This was done at Walton Avenue with the daughter of Rigoberto’s girlfriend at the time. Myra. That was in 1980.
HB: So your collaboration played out between Fashion Moda and Walton Avenue?
JA: Rigoberto was always trying to get away from me, and I was always chasing him and saying, no, no, you’ve got to stay. Then he’s going, no, I’m on my own. So he went to this place on East 100th Street. I was still living at Walton Avenue at the time. Am I right so far?
RT: Yes.
JA: I didn’t know where he was or how to reach him, but he would call me and we’d get back in touch. The Creative Time 42nd Street project in 1993, which was huge, brought us back in collaboration. Immediately following the project, Rigoberto had an asthma attack and almost died. He had no memory and no eyesight for a long time. At the same time a couple of new projects came in. So I met with his wife. I go, I think Rigoberto and I, we’ve got to get together with this. He was living near East 100th Street. So I said, I’m going to get an apartment right there and move next to him.
HB: What was the studio there like? How did it compare to this one?
JA: We had one of our best studios. Some studios are good and some are not so good. This one is terrible because it’s up on the second floor. We have no contact. There’s no meaning here. But where we were on East 100th Street was on a corner, with open access all the way around. There were millions of kids and they wanted to hang out someplace. So we invited them to be in our studio.
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, 42nd Street Sculpture Workshop for 42nd Street Art Project, New York, New York, 1993. Photo by Maggie Hopp, Courtesy of Creative Time.
HB: Tell me about Maggie, from ’86.
JA: It is without doubt the best piece of all of them. We put it in the show at the Bronx Museum [Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, 2022-23]. Hilton Als looked at that and said, I think that represents innocence.
HB: How did you choose who to cast?
RT: It was like a block party where people volunteered themselves. In the beginning we chose, then they chose us.
John Ahearn, Maggie, 1986, Acrylic on plaster, 15 x 15 x 7 inches, (38.1 x 38.1 x 17.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
John Ahearn, Maggie, 1986, Acrylic on plaster, 15 x 15 x 7 inches, (38.1 x 38.1 x 17.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
John Ahearn, Maggie, 1986, Acrylic on plaster, 15 x 15 x 7 inches, (38.1 x 38.1 x 17.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
John Ahearn, Maggie, 1986, Acrylic on plaster, 15 x 15 x 7 inches, (38.1 x 38.1 x 17.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
HB: Who are some key people that have chosen you over the years?
JA: [Points to Rigoberto] He chose me to cast him.
RT: And then, you know, back and forth.
HB: So you started as a model and then became a collaborator.
JA: How long did that take? About 30 minutes.
HB: How much manipulating do you do to the form as the models are being cast? These poses have a classical contrapposto, to use a boring word.
RT: It’s a lot of support. A lot of pillow here, pillow there. Move over here, move over there.
JA: It’s exciting, that boring word. It makes it sculpture. Here’s the deal: Duane Hanson, George Segal, and many others, they always cast people standing up. And that was because it was natural and normal, right? This is the opposite.
RT: Lying down.
JA: The point is that all the earlier figures were freestanding sculptures. But all the information that you need to consider this as a relief is there with them lying down on a table. The table represents the wall.
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Teri, 1980, acrylic on plaster, 15 1/4 x 14 5/8 x 6 3/4 inches (38.7 x 37.1 x 17.1 cm), courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York, © John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
HB: How does authorship work in your collaboration? Some pieces are credited to both of you, and some to either one of you.
RT: It all depends on the way we put it together. Whoever paints it, then that person will take more credit.
JA: I used to say, if one artist conceives of the project and designs it and plans it and instructs the people on how to pose for it, even if we’re doing it together, if Rigoberto’s helping me, I would still call it my piece. But time changes a lot of things.
HB: It’s interesting to think of collaboration as a way of dodging authorship or the singular vision. For something as community minded as this, it seems apt.
JA: I love what you just said.
HB: Good! At Independent there will be several portraits of children. Why kids?
JA: We were casting on the sidewalk at Walton Avenue. There was a moment where all of a sudden everybody was interested. Here was the idea: why don’t we focus on kids as a way to give an edge to a situation with a lot of people? Children are a challenge because they’re the youngest and they know the least. They’re learning the most, and they’re changing the most. They’re the most interesting subjects, because next year they're not going to be like they were last year.
RT: An older person is more alert in the sense that they understand the [life casting] process. They know what’s going to happen.
JA: That’s why kids are great. Kids are dying to try things.
RT: But no matter who you are, throughout the years that we’ve been doing this, it’s a matter of trust between us and the person that we cast.
HB: It’s been 45 years since those first life casts. What’s changed in that time?
JA: We’re talking about kids that we knew when they were six. They grow up and then they’re 16 and then they’re 25 and then they have children. It’s fascinating. It’s different time periods. Everything has its own experience and I never feel the same about any person that I ever cast.
Hunter Braithwaite is Senior Vice President of Cultural Counsel. He was the founding editor of Affidavit and the Miami Rail, and has written about art for numerous publications, including Artforum, BOMB, Modern Painters, The Paris Review Daily, and The White Review. He received his MFA in fiction from New York University.
