Gem City Style: Jesse and Ricardo, Art in Tandem
Academics, artists, and adventurers
There are people in every city who become part of its mythology. Erie has a few. Jesse and Ricardo are among them.
You've seen them. If you haven't, you will. Two men on a tandem bicycle, moving through town like a living painting – dressed in perfect unison, every detail considered, every color intentional. They are not an accident. They are not a coincidence. They are, by their own design, a work of art that has been in progress for over three decades, and Erie has been their canvas.
When I first reached out about featuring them in this column, they didn't hesitate. "Bring it on, Jessica."
They arrived at the patio outside my downtown studio right on time, dressed, as always, identically. Vibrant, deliberate, coordinated. I complimented them immediately, because how could you not? Then I gestured to my own look – a colorful ensemble, funky sneakers – and asked, maybe a little hopefully, how I did.
They approved.
With that settled, we moved inside for what turned out to be one of the most memorable conversations I've had for this column. Jesse and Ricardo didn't give me a sound bite. They gave me a philosophy. And once they started talking, I realized I've been thinking about things a little too small.
They go by the moniker Art in Tandem. The two met at the Blues and Jazz Festival at Frontier Park – one of Erie's most beloved summer traditions – and the story, like everything about them, is perfectly them.
"Ricardo asked me to play tennis," Jesse told me with a smile, "and we've been volleying ever since."
Somewhere around 35 years ago, they decided to become a couple – and with that, they decided to become, in their words, "one person." One cappuccino, shared. One meal between them. One tandem bicycle. It sounds like a concept until you're sitting across from them and realize they've actually done it – that their lives are so genuinely, thoroughly intertwined that separating the two would be like pulling a painting apart by color.
So what is Art in Tandem, exactly? I asked them to describe it to someone who's never encountered them before.
"Art off the wall," Ricardo said without hesitation. "Living, moving art that you can't hang on your wall above the sofa. And it may talk back to you."
Jesse said, "It's not AI. We're not algorithms. We're sentient beings."
That's the line I keep coming back to. In a moment when so much of what we consume has been generated, filtered, optimized – Jesse and Ricardo are radically, defiantly, joyfully human. They are made of choices, not code. Every outfit, every outing, every appearance is considered. Nothing about them is accidental.
"It's a premeditative move," Ricardo said. "As if you're creating or painting a human landscape. You're very conscious about it."
The outfits are where people tend to get stuck, and Jesse and Ricardo know it. Locals sometimes assume the matching aesthetic is a statement about their relationship. It isn't. Or rather, it's about something much larger than that.
"We're doing an art piece with our apparel," Ricardo said. "It has nothing to do with being gay."
And here's the part that stops me: even within the queer community, the assumption persists. "People used to say or think, well, they dress like that because they're gay," Ricardo said. "Even gay people think we're dressing this way because we're gay. So they're stereotyping themselves."
What the work is actually about is intention. Message. The outfits – sourced, refurbished, sometimes made from scratch, frequently featuring vibrant colors and unexpected textures – come together collaboratively and mindfully. Jesse might build the base. Ricardo adds the head wrap. Someone gets the socks right. And when there's a difference of opinion, it isn't a disagreement.
Jesse nodded. "We advise each other, as a good couple does."
The intentional apparel choices of Jesse and Ricardo, or Art In Tandem, are not made for fashion or trend-seeking – with curated pieces, often refurbished or handmade, they are taking agency over their own life experiences and, hopefully, encouraging others to do the same in their own way. (Photos: Jessica Hunter)
They want to be clear about what it isn't: fashion. It isn't trend-chasing. It isn't performance for performance's sake. It's closer to what Ricardo described as raising the level – of living, of thinking, of what we consider possible.
"We don't want this pedestrian look," he said. "I go to work, I come home, I go to the bar, pizza, home to my wife and kids, back to work. We kind of want to raise the level of living. We want to raise the level of people's thinking."
That's not a critique so much as an invitation. Just the day before our interview, someone walked up to them at Starbucks. "I love seeing you guys," the stranger said. "You make my day." Ricardo smiled telling it. That, he said, is the point. "We represent the possibilities. We have unlimited potential – and so do you. We're telling you through us: you have agency. You have agency to create your own world."
Jesse and Ricardo are travelers in the truest sense, and they've carried Art in Tandem far beyond Erie: Paris, Florence, Milan, New York, LA, Rio, Tegucigalpa. They've found that the response is more or less the same wherever they go. As Ricardo put it, in his own gently dated vocabulary: "They dig us." A warmth, a recognition, that seems to translate across every border they cross.
In Spain, people have a name for them. When Jesse and Ricardo come into view, locals call out "Los Gemelos" or "here come the twins." Ricardo said it with a certain quiet pride. Because that's exactly what they're after: to move through the world in a way that shatters the assumptions people carry – about gender, about identity, about what a life can look like.
"That's the whole point," Ricardo said. "To break stereotypes."
Ricardo told me, "People are evolving. They're coming to realize that peace is the answer. Peace, love, creativity, authenticity – these things are the way it should be."
Jesse put it plainly. The culture is catching up. But it's late.
"They are late," Ricardo agreed – not with bitterness, but with the kind of patient certainty that belongs to people who have been right about something for a very long time and simply waited for the world to catch up.
There's something generous in the way Jesse and Ricardo move through Erie. Their visibility has never felt like a demand. It feels more like an offering – look, this is possible, this is what it looks like to fully inhabit your own life.
"We choose to be seen," Jesse said. "We want people to know we're not hiding. We're not trying to identify as something. We just want to be there – like they're there. We want you to try it yourself, too."
Taking up space, they said, is part of it. Not demanding space but creating it. "You come as yourself and you make your own space," Ricardo said. "And if it doesn't fit, you can always create a new one. Or better yet, expand your thinking." The implication being: there's room for everyone, but you have to be willing to show up and claim it.
Jesse puts it simply: "Respect for artistic and cultural endeavors, pursuits, and aesthetic judgments. When they see us – hopefully they see a little bit of themselves."
When people see them riding through town, I asked, what do they think the first thought is?
Jesse grinned. "There go those guys."
That is the definition of iconic.
They've dubbed their home "the Poetics of Space," and it is exactly that. A living gallery that doubles as their life, filled only with what holds meaning. Every object chosen deliberately. Nothing decorative for decoration's sake. Everything earned its place.
There's an exit sign mounted on one wall, pulled from somewhere and installed in a corner where it became, Ricardo says, aesthetically pleasing in a way that surprised even them. A refurbished café sign, the café long gone but the sign still glowing. Mixed-media pieces made from Guatemalan coffee grounds and artifacts collected on their travels. Nothing is brought in unless it means something.
"We don't bring anything into the space that isn't meaningful to us," Ricardo said. "And 'meaningful' can be interpreted rather broadly."
Their reach extends well beyond Erie's city limits and well beyond what most people realize. Locally, they've presented at Gannon, Mercyhurst, and Edinboro on art, life, and literature. Abroad, the list reads like a well-stamped passport: Toulon University in France, Bogotá, Colombia, Oxford in the UK. They once sat in the window of a bookstore in Vienna, Austria – living art in the most literary of settings. At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, they walked through Yves Klein's legendary blue show, surrounded by that impossible, electric Klein blue, and did what anyone who truly understands art would do.
They attempted to jump into the void.
"We can't remember all the experiences after 30 years," Ricardo said with a laugh – which tells you everything about the kind of life they've built. Not curated for an audience. Just lived, fully, and documented in memory rather than content.
Before they left the studio, I asked what the next chapter of Art in Tandem looks like. Ricardo thought about it for a moment.
"It's like you read a poem," he said. "What the poem is saying is not always on the surface. It's between the lines. It's sometimes what isn't said. So stop thinking about what you think it is. It's about something deeper than that."
Jesse, for his part, offered one final note on where their heads are.
"We love to read books," he said.
Of course they do. And you may catch them reading at a local coffee shop for "cappuccino klatsch time."
Jesse and Ricardo have been raising the level of living in this city for a few decades. They've been doing it on a tandem bicycle, in matching outfits, through a philosophy that is equal parts art theory, love story, and quiet challenge to everyone around them to show up more fully as themselves.
Jesse and Ricardo ride together as Art in Tandem, Erie's most iconic living art duo. Find them downtown, at the farmers market, at vintage car shows, or gliding past you on a tandem bicycle just when you need the reminder that life can be more interesting than you're making it.
Gem City Style is a monthly column featuring an intimate profile of someone making a creative impact in Erie. If you or someone you know would make a good fit for a future Gem City Style, email jessica@eriereader.com
