Joining ART/new york and working with Paul Tschinkel provided me with an opportunity to interact with both established artists and younger talents that I admired. In the 1980s my taste in art tended towards the extreme: the fusion of art, music and nightlife; fringe alternative spaces like Fashion Moda and ABC No Rio; and barrier-breaking art movements linked to gender, race and outsider concerns. The first program I worked on, "New York/New Wave," featured many artists who participated in the Punk Art show that I had helped curate a few years earlier. "Graffiti/Post Graffiti," "New Public Sculpture," and "Young Expressionists" have been my favorite ART/new york programs.

John Ahearn was one of the artists in "New Public Sculpture." His painted plaster casts of local South Bronx residents generated wide enthusiasm in the early 1980s at a time when young artists were searching for ways to connect with real life and real people. In July 1982, ART/new york covered the dedication ceremonies for "We Are Family," a public sculpture in the South Bronx that Ahearn made in collaboration Rigoberto Torres. The enthusiastic response to "We are Family" stood in sharp contrast to the negative reception that greeted Richard Serra's contemporary "Tilted Arc," a controversy we covered in another ART/ new york tape. Ironically, Ahearn experienced his own public art controversy nine years later, when a vocal community member loudly questioned the types of neighborhood people he chose to cast for a public sculpture to be placed outside a South Bronx police station. Stung by the criticism, Ahearn removed the sculpture only days after its unveiling in 1991. "We Are Family," the 1982 winner of best public sculpture, survives at 156 Street and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx.