Red Peanut

Since the late 1970s, John Ahearn has produced intensely detailed and highly emotive figurative sculpture that portrays the members of the South Bronx community in which he lives. The artist’s process and subjects integrate his art into a social context: he finds his sitters and fabricates his sculpture, using unrefined materials, on local neighborhood sidewalks. Ahearn celebrates the possibilities of making participatory art on the street, outside established art-world institutions. Each of his sitters becomes a collaborator, as he or she must sit still for hours during the casting process. Red Peanut depicts a joyous, exuberant young woman nicknamed Peanut. With these portraits, Ahearn elevates the unsung residents of an urban neighborhood to heroic status.