‘An Elaborate Ruse to Trick Neighbors Into Saying Hello’ Comes to a Bittersweet End

Over the past year, 202 Brooklynites have sipped coffee, slouched and sometimes snoozed in the red, upholstered chair that now sits perched on a wooden pedestal inside a street-level gallery at Building 8 of Industry City.

Each of those people of Southern Brooklyn, some lifers and others relatively new arrivals, had spilled neighborhood stories and sometimes secrets while they sat for four or five hours, allowing artist Rusty Zimmerman to produce an oil painting of them, for them, in a sun-soaked studio space upstairs.

Subject #21, Basil Saylor, shared his impossible ambitions of becoming the “pirate king” of Bensonhurst. Pink-haired Marquina Iliev of Sunset Park, #153, ruminated on how her air guitar practice helped her navigate chemotherapy. Flatlands native Stanley Delva, #69, talked about what it means to earn the right to “properly talk shit” about New York City. Vivian Lui of Bath Beach, #63, recalled how her grandfather became a laundromat owner in Manhattan’s Chinatown post-World War II, shortly after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Zimmerman started the “Free Portrait Project” in 2015, as a way to practice painting and connect with his neighbors in Crown Heights. After moving to Kensington, he spent 2023 on a second round called “We Are South Brooklyn,” spreading the word on flyers and social media and picking up support where he could. 

(While the term “South Brooklyn” dates back to when the borough was its own city, and often refers to the neighborhoods on what was then its border, including Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus and Park Slope, Zimmerman’s project was for people in Southern Brooklyn, which he defined as anywhere below Prospect Park.)

These 202 portraits are together on display in Industry City from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Friday and Saturday — before…