CROWN HEIGHTS — The neighborhood’s portrait is nearly complete.
After almost a year of work, artist Rusty Zimmerman is closing in on his goal: painting 200 portraits of Crown Heights residents for free.
Currently, he’s completed 90 percent of the Free Portrait Project, created in the neighborhood “to document who we all are now amid shifting demographics” and “foster engagement across cultural boundaries,” he said.
To that end, he’s introduced a lot of people to the diverse faces of Crown Heights. Zimmerman’s portraits — of elected officials, tenant organizers, musicians, shopkeepers and new arrivals of different ages and ethnicities — have hung all over the neighborhood in past months, decorating coffee shops, bars, construction fencing on Eastern Parkway and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
A sampling of the portraits painted for the Free Portrait Project: Crown Heights hangs on the wall of Rusty Zimmerman's studio, located at 1000 Dean St. (Photo credit: DNAinfo/Rachel Holliday Smith)
Now, Zimmerman is trying to bring them all together at the area’s biggest artistic institution: the Brooklyn Museum. In a Change.org petition, the artist is asking residents to push the museum to exhibit the Free Portrait Project when it’s complete, a move that would serve to “bridge the dynamic cultures of the community,” he said.
“This is tremendous opportunity for the museum to engage with its neighbors, to reflect the community that it serves by literally showing their faces and hosting their stories within the museum walls,” Zimmerman said.
The museum has not ruled out exhibiting the portraits, a Brooklyn Museum spokeswoman said. The project has been reviewed by the museum's exhibition committee, she said, and the programs department is considering a future collaboration with the Free Portrait Project, to be determined.
Either way, Zimmerman is hoping to create a final exhibition of the portraits — and recorded interviews with their subjects, completed in partnership with a concurrent oral history project at the Brooklyn Historical Society — in the neighborhood in late summer or early fall, he said.
Looking back on the year, Zimmerman said he thinks the project has been “tremendously” successful, particularly as a way of “acting as a conduit to share stories [and] introduce people to their neighbors.
“My office has literally been open to the public all year long, 24/7, for just that purpose — to invite interaction between people who may otherwise never meet,” he said.
That includes his neighbor, a woman from the Caribbean, sitting in on the portrait session of a member of the Lubavitch Jewish community or another painting subject, a 30-year-old black man and Crown Heights native, who agreed to come to a Shabbat dinner in the neighborhood after telling Zimmerman he’d never spoken with an Orthodox Jew before.
“After four hours of beer and brisket and letting the kids jump all over us and talking openly … he said, ‘That just shattered every expectation I had about these people,’” he said.
The Free Portrait Project: Crown Heights is set to wrap up on June 30, Zimmerman said. To find out more about the project, visit WeAreCrownHeights.org.
