Acclaimed Crown Heights Free Portrait Project Moves South

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Brooklyn is full of people with stories, and Rusty Zimmerman is good at routing them out.

In 2015, he advertised free portraits in Crown Heights with the goal of connecting a changing, diverse neighborhood.

That year, he painted 200 portraits, collecting oral histories of each subject as he painted, and exhibited his project at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, Brooklyn Borough Hall and a documentary screening at Brooklyn Museum.

Now the artist, who used to paint a certain former New York governor, is taking his acclaimed free portrait project to his new home of south Brooklyn, seeking to document the diverse canvass from Sunset Park to Kensington to Coney Island through 200 new portraits and interviews.

What started as a way to bring oil-painted portraits, "historically a fancy thing for fancy people," to regular people for free, Zimmerman said, quickly turned into a community-building project along the way.

"It hurts my heart to to make something that only people at a certain level of means could afford," he told Patch, "I think that's what set me out to make what I do available to everybody."

In 2015, Zimmerman worked closely with Community Board Eight and other local institutions to ensure he had a deep mix of residents in his project, "inclusive of Caribbean elders and Lubavitcher Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights," he told Patch.

Eventually, the project had over 500 applications.

His finished product reveals a neighborhood awash in color and stories, but the community building happens during the process, too.

When painting a portrait of a young Crown Heights resident in 2015, a process that takes about four hours in his studio, Zimmerman said a couple who had also signed up for the project came in during the session, apparently having mixed up their calendars.

Instead of asking the man, a retired Rabbi from Buffalo, and his wife to leave and come back on the correct day, Zimmerman invited them to sit and share a bottle of wine the current portrait sitter had brought.

Turns out, Zimmerman said, the young man's father used to be a minister.

"They had a lot to talk about regarding the Old Testament," Zimmerman said, and"by the end of it, and by the bottom of a bottle of wine, everybody was just kind of telling jokes, back and forth, and enjoying each other's company."

The Free Portrait Project, Zimmerman said, is "all about introducing neighbors who might not otherwise say hello to one another."

After 11 years of living in Crown Heights, Zimmerman decamped to Kensington with his wife and step-children.

Now he seeks to explore and celebrate the communities in south Brooklyn, too.

In a two block radius,"there's Bangladeshi, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Mexican, Orthodox Jewish," Zimmerman said of his new home's diversity, "and Rusty."

The project will be Zimmerman's full time job for the next year or so and he's currently seeking funding from a number of grants and sponsors, including crowdfunded donations, which is how he fueled his Crown Heights project.

Top of mind for Zimmerman is finding ADA-compliant studio space, like he had in his old neighborhood.

That meant people like 94-year-old Osceola Fletcher could participate, who shared his incredible life story for the project.

"He had escaped foster care by hopping freight trains during the Great Depression," Zimmerman readily recounted, "then [was] on a warship, just outside of France in World War Two, worked undercover as a narcotics officer for the NYPD in the 1970s and then settled into being a high school English teacher in Crown Heights."

"To think that I might have like missed out on hearing all those stories just because of some stairs," Zimmerman said, "that's why accessibility is so critical."

At the Free Portrait Project's exhibition at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, all 200 portraits hung together.

Fletcher's portrait, the oldest participant, was hung next to the youngest, a nine-day-old baby.

If you live in south Brooklyn, you can apply to the Free Portrait Project here and you can apply until the end of the year.

The portraits are, as implied in the name, free, and take about four hours.

You can also nominate someone for the project, too, like the former student who nominated Mr. Fletcher.