John Ahearn and his identical twin Charlie (Wildstyle) attended St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic elementary school and created a mural of the Crusades for the back of their 6th grade class. As an artist downtown in the 70’s, he was preparing a monster movie and he learned to life-cast faces of his Colab friends. In 1979, He did face-casting in the window at Fashion Moda in the Bronx and drew crowds. The lifecast portraits were hung along the walls of Fashion Moda as the “South Bronx Hall of Fame”.

Rigoberto Torres was 17 attending Taft high School in the the Bronx. He saw the relief portraits at Fashion Moda and understood a connection to his Uncle Raul’s Bronx statuary factory. He and John formed an art partnership that still continues. During the 80’s they developed community casting workshops in the Bronx that produced several permanent neighborhood sculpture murals.

Recently, they were art residents at the Inhotim Art Center in Brazil and completed two large wall reliefs including a whole bus with local passengers and an Afro-Catholic procession. John and his Afro/Rican wife Juanita and their son Carlos live in East Harlem and attend mass every Sunday at the Church of the Holy Agony.