REBICYCLING THE62.ORG THE SCENE LAST Saturday at the Bronx Museum of Art ...

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THE62.ORG

THE SCENE LAST Saturday at the Bronx Museum of Art was one of giddy, industrious commotion: a tangle of kids, quasi-grownups, bike parts and grease. It was the weekly work session of Rebicycling, a fledgling 10-week program led by The 62, a Brooklyn-based art collective, in which kids strip down bikes, rebuild and customize them, in the process exploring art and issues of environmental sustainability, health and transportation. At the end, the kids keep their bikes.

"The South Bronx has some of the highest rates of asthma in the country," says Hubert McCabe, a social worker and farmer who's one of the project's leaders. "It's the home of numerous waste transfer stations?interstate highways and no cross-town trains-leaving residents dependent on buses, cars and taxis for their interborough transportation. In the face of all of this, the South Bronx is teeming with community gardens, environmental activism and educational projects that confront the environmental racism so prevalent here and in other depressed communities (predominantly) of color. In that sense, the Bronx represents a dumping- as well as battleground on the front lines of the environmental debate in this city and country."

The 62, whose five members met both growing up in Connecticut and later at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan, found grant money through BXMA and Conjunction Arts. They reached out to kids at Highbridge Community Life Center, where McCabe works, and the Bronx International High School, a New Visions school opened in 2002 that gives recent immigrant students an intensive language development program.

When The 62 visited the high school, the room was packed. "Everyone wanted to do it," 16-year-old Bexis recalls. Of the initial group of 10 kids, six remain: Bexis, Johanna, Esemu, Debbie, Foad and Carlos, who range in age from 14 to 18.

Rebicycling rescued 15 dilapidated bikes from Bicycle Station, a shop on Vanderbilt Ave. Matt McGuinness and Cooper Gill, the main technicians, sized frames to the teens, and Andrei Kallaur and others helped them figure out what kind of bike they wanted. Then the kids took the bikes apart. While a few new parts might be needed here and there, the point is to resuscitate the old-to reuse what's still quite capable of service.

Each teen's custom design is affixed via sticker to their bike frame: Sandblasting takes off all the paint except for what's underneath them. During the process of figuring out bike designs and titles, The 62 gave a few slideshows and presentations about typography, and attempted to generate discussions, which Morgan Sheasby said was "like pulling teeth." It wasn't until the crew did a walking tour of typography on the buildings, sidewalks and skylines of the surrounding neighborhoods that the concepts began to truly resonate. Even then, the creative process encountered some hurdles.

At first, everyone wanted to title their bikes "G-Unit," the 50 Cent shtick. "It was a risk to try to get [the kids] to move away from established realms, from what they're accustomed to," McGuinness says. In an attempt to nudge the teens in a different direction, Sheasby told them, "That's great, if you just want to copy 50 Cent." Whether or not it was that gentle barb (which did strike a nerve), something must have clicked. The couple of designs I saw-most of the bikes were off getting sandblasted-were unique and well-crafted.

Bexis showed me various stages of her bike's design. Angular, intricate and industrial, the final design reveals the words "Nature Lover." She enthused about the collaboration with McGuinness, who partnered with her to flesh out the best visual expression of her concept. Being able to add her "own personal touch" excites Bexis: "You're making your own thing, your own brand, with your own hands."

McCabe calls the teens' drive "intoxicating." And this project does take drive: Bexis travels an hour every Saturday to get to BXMA; Johanna travels two. School-provided Metrocards don't work on weekends, and some have walked miles to get to the museum. Violence, whether in the form of aggressive cops and teachers or gangs, is part of everyday life for Rebicycling participants. More than one comes from a war-torn country, and then there's the universal turbulence of adolescence, whether it's gender roles, SATs or fitting in with friends. When I asked what motivates them to devote 10 precious Saturdays to work on bikes, 14-year-old Debbie (a photographer who was just accepted to the Bronx High School of Contemporary Art) said simply, "It's fun!"

Rebicycling will close with a bicycle tour of the South Bronx on Sunday, June 13. Everyone is welcome. Because of Rebicycling's success, Recycle-a-Bicycle , an environmental education and youth development organization, is adopting the program and making it permanent.