KENNY CUMMINGS

The BUILDER

- SETH RICHARDS

“Vintage motorcycle racing has taught me that you can’t always have absolutes in things,” Kenny Cummings says as he regards the 1936 Norton International sitting on a lift at his third-floor workshop in a massive old industrial building in Jersey City.

Cummings is a racer, a musician, and the gregarious owner of NYC Norton, a two-man enterprise that specializes in high-end Norton restorations and vintage racing.

“I love the ride, I love the race, but I also love the production side of things. There’s very much these fundamentals about it. It’s been a push-pull thing, growing up as an artistic kid,” Cummings says by way of explaining his affinity for both the ordered, objective world of the workbench and the unpredictable world of vintage racing. “Art is all about not-absolutes.”

It’s no wonder Cummings seems most at home on the racing line. It traces the margin between the predictable and the unknowable. Clinging to it is at once a dogged pursuit and an acceptance of outcomes beyond control.

Cummings moved to New York in 1986 to make it in the music business, emboldened by a faith in the vastness of possibility and driven by the thrill of the pursuit. He wound up touring and programming synthesizers for the likes of Elvis

Costello and Aretha Franklin, as well as landing a lucrative job in the art world. But all the while, there was a focus-narrowing intruder in the background: the Norton motorcycle.