LIVE, FROM NEW YORK

John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres's portraits of the South Bronx.

- HILTON ALS

Part of what makes John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’s show Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits” at the Bronx Museum) 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. By obliterating communities, you obliterated all that they fostered: the happy accidents and impromptu encounters that could lead to an exchange of ideas that might expand your understanding of both the individual and the community as a whole. Ahearn, who makes plaster-cast sculptures of Black and Hispanic people he has known and admired in the four decades that he’s worked in the South Bronx, captures some of what Jacobs celebrated: the intelligence that goes into not only surviving the streets but making them feel like home. For Ahearn, God is in the people.