‘An Elaborate Ruse to Trick Neighbors Into Saying Hello’ Comes to a Bittersweet End
After more than a thousand hours of painting, artist Rusty Zimmerman is ready to return the oil portraits he’s made to their subjects, the people of Southern Brooklyn.
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.