“Swagger and Tenderness,” at the Bronx Museum, brings back the beauty of a struggling community.
Part of what makes John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’s show “Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits” so remarkable is that it reminds you of two things that made New York City, predevelopment, so remarkable: chance and faith. Back in 1961, Jane Jacobs, in her prescient study “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that urban planning—highways, high-rises, and malls—came at a terrible price.
In 1980, Colab produced one of the greatest exhibitions I have ever seen: “The Times Square Show.
I didn’t know anything about Ahearn then. But, as I later learned, he’d had no experience with plaster casting until 1979, when he was spending time at Fashion Moda, an experimental community art space in the South Bronx. He was inspired to make sculptural work in part by a friend who repaired old castings and statues for the Museum of Natural History, and in part by a book he read called “Makeup for Theater, Film and Television.
As Ahearn explored his new form, Torres became a creative partner, and an essential one. Torres, who lived on Walton Avenue, too, was a local and Ahearn wasn’t. Working together, the sculptors had a better chance of getting the people in the neighborhood to trust them enough to sit for them and be depicted in the work—work that spoke to and about Ahearn’s interest in their lives, at a time when there was scant evidence that anyone outside the Bronx was interested at all.
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