Rigoberto Torres: Vecinos
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Vecinos, an exhibition by the iconic sculptor Rigoberto Torres. The works on view span over forty years and encompass a range of figures and sizes that together capture the artist’s vibrant and evolving Bronx community. Torres’s attentiveness to the particularities of the individual and the ways in which collections of small details come together to create a unique identity renders these works a collective portrait that constitutes a prolonged and tender act of care. Torres’s sculptures reflect the faces of his friends and neighbors and become monuments to the resilience of the diasporic community of his longtime home.
Born in Puerto Rico, Torres moved to the Bronx as a small child and would remain there for much of his career. At a young age, he began a collaborative artistic relationship with John Ahearn, with whom he later shared a studio and would often set up live casting sessions on city sidewalks. Working both together and separately, Torres and Ahearn produced a body of work that reflects the lively character of the Bronx through its diverse inhabitants. Torres brings a vibrant, colorful sensibility to his figures that has roots in his early experience in his uncle’s workshop making cast religious statuary. Often originally displayed on the outside of buildings in the neighborhood, Torres’s wall-based busts elevate everyday people to a place of modern-day veneration and monumentality.
A signature of Torres’s works is their dynamic sense of movement and scale. A centerpiece of the exhibition is Fortune Teller (1995), a large work that places the viewer on the receiving end of the mystic’s table, her expressive hands and long nails hovering above a glowing crystal ball. The life casting process can last for an extended period of time, a period that fosters an intimacy between artist and subject that shines through in the work. “Getting to know someone truly takes time, and each person I have cast becomes part of my family, holding a special place in my heart,” he explained. Here, the direct encounter is enhanced by the figure’s angled posture, as if she is leaning forward to impart a juicy twist of fate.
Other figures give a wider sense of the characters who populate the neighborhood. The fireman, the mother and child, the president of the local hangout; each has their place in a thriving community, each holds a small piece of the collective spirit that makes a place what it is. Torres’s work speaks to a resilience of spirit, honoring the lives of everyday people and inviting the viewer into communion with their likenesses – when hung at eye level, the figures and viewers intermingle and entering the gallery can feel like walking into a party in medias res.
In more recent works, Torres turns his eye to a community of performers from his current home in Florida. Works such as Jerriel Juggles the Pins (2026) and Jenny on Tightrope (2025) stretch the frame of his sculptural gaze beyond the figure to incorporate the tools of their trade, be they colorful juggling pins, a tautly stretched slackline, or a unicycle. These later works accentuate the artist’s interest in exaggerated postures and perspectives, their motion is suspended yet they still feel as if they may leap from the wall at any moment. Whether depicting the performers of Florida or the Puerto Rican diaspora of the Bronx, Torres immortalizes the unique figures of his community, affirming the value of each individual within it.
Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960, Aquadilla, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Orlando, Florida) and has produced life-cast sculpted portraits and scenes of the South Bronx community for nearly four decades individually and collaboratively with Bronx-based artist John Ahearn.
Torres’s work was exhibited in Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway) at the Ringling Museum in October 2025. Ahearn and Torres’ collaborative work has been the subject of numerous two-person exhibitions, including Swagger & Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 2022; and Automatic for the People: John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, in 2010. Their South Bronx Hall of Fame works were the subject of a special presentation at Frieze Projects, New York, curated by Cecilia Alemani, in 2012. From 1991-1992, their work was the subject of a major traveling exhibition, The South Bronx Hall of Fame: Sculpture by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, which travelled from the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, to Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands, to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.
In 2024, the artists are included in several significant exhibitions, including Shifting Landscapes, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; American Vignettes: Symbols, Society, and Satire, The Rubell Museum, Washington D.C.; and Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA). Recent group exhibitions include City as Studio, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, in 2022; East Village, New York City, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea, in 2018; Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017; Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and The Body, The Met Breuer, New York, in 2018; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, in 2016.
Their collaborative and individual work has been collected by numerous public museums, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.