They Reminisce: Casting the South Bronx Hall of Fame

_{Closing party of South Bronx Hall of Fame exhibition [Ahearn, bottom, second from right], Fashion Moda, October (1979) | Photo by Lisa Kahane}

Against the backdrop of landlord-sponsored arson that buildings to rubble and ash, South Bronx emerged at the vanguard of music, art, and culture during the 1970s. Graffiti writers bombed the trains inside and out, turning whole cars into monumental works of outlaw art. Visionaries like John Fekner and Gordon Matta Clark seized the landscape as their canvas, crafting epic interventions of public art that underscored the perilous folly of T.W.U. (Transport Workers Union), Richard Serra’s monstrous sculpture looming ominously over Tribeca. Gentrification had come to downtown New York, more than a decade after manufacturers has fled the city. Artists and galleries flocked to the abandoned lofts, creating a band apart from the well-heeled Upper East Side art world. But, as gallerist Stefan Eins knew, you had to head further north if you wanted to be uptown.

In Fall 1978, he opened Fashion Moda on 148th Street and Third Avenue in “The Hub” — the living, breathing, beating heart of the South Bronx. Imagined as a “Museum of Science, Art, Invention, Technology, and Fantasy,” Fashion Moda discarded banal conventions and stale clichés of institutional practice and academic thought, embracing a new generation of artists and writers like Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Lee Quiñones , John Crash Matos, Chris Daze Ellis, and Joe Lewis, who later became gallery co-director along with local teenager William Scott.

Between 1978–1993, Fashion Moda was instrumental in remaking the New York art world as an inclusive, progressive space for the avant-garde that eschewed the cannibalistic trappings of the neoliberalism that had begun to devour the art world. Auction houses hit record highs as collectors swarmed, with galleries hungering to find the next Jean-Michel Basquiat. At Fashion Moda, art was not treated as product, not artists as extractable resource; instead the gallery encouraged an experimental, collective approach made possible by a business model that relied upon grants and donors rather than sales.

Fashion Moda opened in the fall of 1978 and quickly became a nexus of the uptown and downtown scenes. Eins was a member of Colab (Collaborative Projects), the artist collective that understood where and how an exhibition was staged was as important as the work being shown. Its members included Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell, Jane Dickson, and twin brothers Charlie Ahearn and John Ahearn. At the time, John Ahearn had been staying in FUN gallerist Patti Astor’s 10th Street apartment, where he happened upon a copy of Make-up for Film and Television on her bookshelf. “I was working on a monster movie so I started reading it, and it was all about life casting; how to make molds of people’s faces so you can make prosthetics; immediately I knew I wanted to experiment with this,” says Ahearn, who soon thereafter brought his talents to Fashion Moda.

The gallery boasted enormous plexiglass store front windows that created a theatrical effect, transforming the interior into a stage for living art. Crowds gathered to watch the scene, Eins’s face completely covered with white plaster but for two straws placed inside the nostrils so he could breathe. Ahearn imagined Eins as alien superstar, painting his face a lurid shade of lemon lime, eyes shrouded by the gentle hands of his assistant Hector, a neighborhood resident. The effect was electric, and Ahearn knew there and then, this was the place to be. He made two casts: one for the sitter and one for himself that was hung in the gallery for “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” an installation that steadily grew as 1979 progressed, culminating that fall as a closing party for the community.

Forty-five years later, this seminal body of work is being shown together again in Walton Ave & Friends at Salon 94 in New York. The exhibition brings together works by Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, a neighborhood teen turned longtime collaborator, along with the Walton Avenue mural Back to School, that evokes the indomitable spirit of Old New York. Here is a world where anything was possible if you make it so; carpe diem, as the saying goes.

It’s just what Bronx resident David Ortiz did when he walked through the doors of Fashion Moda back in 1979. “David was full of bravura and excitement; he talked a mile a minute, and he said, ‘I want to make the best cast that that you ever made right now,’” Ahearn remembers. “I had already experimented pouring the stuff in somebody’s mouth, and we decided to do that with David, to really make a sculpture out of it.” Ahearn imagined Ortiz on the Coney Island Cyclone, shirt collar blown open, his eyes rolling in ecstasy, mouth open wide mid-scream. It’s an image of pure, unbridled delight that ended up being a watershed moment in Ahearn’s life. Ortiz told his cousin, Rigoberto Torres, about the encounter. Hailing from Puerto Rico, Torres had moved with his family to the South Bronx in 1970 at the age of 10, only to be uprooted time and again as arson spread like wildfire across the neighborhood. As a teen, he began an apprenticeship at his uncle Raul Arce’s local factory, learning classical sculpture techniques and making Botanica statuettes.

After his cousin David described the scene at Fashion Moda, Torres headed over to check it out. “John did a cast on me, and then I started hang around as much as possible every day,” he remembers. “We used to spend all day working at Fashion Moda. After awhile, I decided to borrow some equipment and take it to my neighborhood, Walton Avenue, where I started to do casting of my friend Felix on a table in front of the building. That was the first time I did it on my own.” Inspired by Torres’s work outside Fashion Moda, Ahearn followed suit, setting up a studio on Walton Avenue the following year so they could continue to work together. Nearly half a century later, Ahearn and Torres remain collaborators and friends, their partnership at testament to the power of creativity, community, and the DIY ethos at the heart of New York.

Walton Ave & Friends is on view through August 16, at Salon 94 in New York.

Follow Miss Rosen on Twitter