Rigoberto Torres

(Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, 1960 - )

American

Born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York at the age of 4, Rigoberto Torres has dedicated the last four decades to making plaster cast sculptures of Black and Hispanic people he has known and admired in his neighborhood of the South Bronx. He has built this practice through sustained collaboration alongside artist John Ahearn, and committed to a vernacular way of art making, working with neighbors as subjects, to expand the site of the studio to the street and create a process of making that delights in the power of its sitter. 

The two artists met in 1979, when eighteen-year-old Torres started going to Fashion Moda, a former clothing store turned into an alternative art space in the South Bronx, where Ahearn was making plaster body casts of people in the neighborhood. This meeting was not unique, as Fashion Moda was known as a place where Downtown artists and South Bronx artists exchanged ideas. It was an early venue for major artists of the 1980s, including Tim Rollins + KOS, Lady Pink, Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness, Joe Lewis, and Lee Quinones.1 Torres and Ahearn first exhibited together at Fashion Moda in 1979 and then the following year in the historic Times Square Art Show, arranged by Colab (a group both were a part of).  

Torres’s work alongside collaborator Ahearn was the subject of a survey exhibition, South Bronx Hall of Fame, organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Houston in 1991, which traveled to museums in Europe and North America. In the 1980s and 1990s the artists executed several public projects and exhibitions in Europe and North America. In the fall of 2010, their work was the subject of a dedicated exhibition at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Torres has been selected for the Whitney Biennial Exhibition and the Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of numerous major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Torres and Ahearn are currently enjoying a well-deserved wave of institutional recognition. In 2023, the Bronx Museum hosted a major survey exhibition, Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits, which garnered rave reviews from Hilton Als in The New Yorker and Travis Diehl in The New York Times. The duo’s ongoing prominence continues with their inclusion in 2023 exhibitions To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood at the ICA Boston, Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art Since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, that opened in fall 2024.

Orlando, Florida

View objects by this artist.