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 they are returned to their subjects and dispersed at a closing ceremony on Sunday.
One intention of the project, Zimmerman said, has been to offer the art of portraiture — a practice that traditionally depicts the affluent — to everyday New Yorkers for free. The other, he continued, has been to make connections among neighbors — on canvases, between people, and by recording and sharing oral histories of his subject’s neighborhoods.
“I do this not to necessarily put diversity or demographic makeups to the forefront,” Zimmerman said when THE CITY visited the Industry City gallery on Wednesday. “It’s more so to highlight the threads of parallels that connect everybody across that spectrum of racial, cultural, socio-economic, geographic diversity — and the things that everyone has in common.”
Like how he and portrait subject #80, José Alberto Soto Moreno, both enjoy making paella from scratch even though Zimmerman is a 44-year-old catering chef–turned–artist raised in Louisiana and California, and Soto Moreno is a 63-year-old Nuyorican who retired as a MTA bus driver after 27 years on the job.
“But then the difference between us is that I will stockpile my refrigerator labeled and dated with prepared foods for the week from my history as a catering chef, whereas José will keep like, mustard and water and maybe a bottle of wine,” said Zimmerman.
“I don’t keep nothing at home,” responded Soto Moreno, who volunteered as a gallery sitter in the space Wednesday, bringing along a bottle of wine. His family had moved to Sunset Park in 1969, Soto Moreno said, and he has lived in Bay Ridge for the past 20 years.
Zimmerman has come to relish two particular moments that often emerged over his more than 200 portrait sittings, he said during an FAQ NYC episode last year, while painting THE CITY’s Harry Siegel as subject #19 for the series.
The first is when he finds out he’s “twinsies” with his subject, like with Soto Moreno and paella. The second is “the hour of uncomfortable admission” — when Zimmerman and his subject take turns disclosing their mistaken preconceptions about one another.
Soto Moreno, who first heard about the project from his daughter, subject #83 Natalie Yasmin Soto, said that meant confronting his apprehensions around the painting process and overcoming his discomfort of being pictured at all.
Zimmerman chimed in: “I think for me, thinking of a bus driver for the MTA for 27 years, I didn’t expect that they would have a thorough knowledge of the craftsmanship involved in ladies handbags as a fashion designer.”
Soto Moreno, who at one point lived down the block from the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot, used to drive the B4 to Sheepshead Bay, the B9 to Kings Plaza, the B11 to Borough Park, and the B61 to Long Island City in Queens “all the way” from Red Hook. (That B61 route is now split between the B61 and B62 routes.)
He once considered a career in designing handbags, he said, and had at some point attended Fashion Institute of Technology classes. But ultimately, he concluded, he was discouraged by what he had seen in the garment district.
“There were basically pocketbook shops all over the place, and any pocketbook idea that I had, I saw them on the walls,” Soto Moreno recalled. “So I said, ‘No, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel.’ I let it go.”
Driving buses in Brooklyn for nearly three decades, though, has left him with plenty of stories about the borough — some bizarre, some infuriating, some bittersweet.
“People have sex on the bus, you see fights on the bus — all kinds of things — people getting pickpocketed,” he recalled.
One regular rider, a 6-foot-2 elderly man who remained in what had been the Scandinavian part of Bay Ridge, used to always show up to Soto Moreno’s bus in a blazer and a tie, he recalled.
“And I would ask him, ‘Where are you going?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to the senior citizen centers, to basically go help others,’” Soto Moreno said. “And he was 99! So I told him, ‘When you turn 100, I’ll have your birthday cake.’”
“He never made it to 100,” he continued.
‘My Favorite Part’
The portrait subjects’ engagement in the project doesn’t just end after their hours in the red chair. Every first Sunday of the month, Zimmerman has held public receptions at Sunset Park’s Cafe Nube, where participants, their friends and family members could meet one another and see some of the portraits.
“I often half-joke that the whole thing is an elaborate ruse to trick neighbors into saying hello — but it’s true,” Zimmerman wrote in an exhibition introduction text displayed in the gallery.
Along with cancer survivors who found support and solidarity with each other, Zimmerman said he’s connected a former evangelical missionary who converted to Islam with a lifelong Muslim who’d decided to take off her hijab, and an amateur seamstress with a hobbyist who made their own puppets.
Soto Moreno, for one, realized through Zimmerman’s collection of oral histories that he had gone to high school with another one of Zimmerman’s portrait subjects in Southern Brooklyn. Zimmerman himself, too, discovered that one of his subjects had lived in the same house as him at one point.
“That deliberate catalyzing of community engagement — that was my favorite part,” added Zimmerman, who said he likes to challenge his subjects to connect with their neighbors through meetups and volunteer or civic opportunities. “I tried to give everybody these community engagement assignments on the fly… That way we can do some sort of active change towards the world that we’d like to see.”
Soto Moreno, who Zimmerman assigned to connect with the South Brooklyn Mutual Aid group, said he still gets emails from the group that provides clothing and resources to asylum seekers.
“I think it’s important. I think sometimes we don’t do it either because we’re shy, or we don’t know how or we don’t know where,” said Soto Moreno.
Soto Moreno said he is looking forward to meeting more of the project’s participants at the closing ceremony on Sunday, but that he’s also feeling a little blue about its ending. The gallery walls will be stripped bare then, with subjects taking home the 202 portraits that will never be together again.
“That’s what I kind of lament — that after this is over I’m not gonna see these people again,” Soto Moreno said. “Why? Because that’s just the nature of being in New York: ‘We did this event, and we’re done, and we dissolve.’”
“I will respectfully disagree,” Zimmerman responded, noting his new friendship with one portrait subject.
Soto Moreno relented: “That’s great. I’d love to be wrong.”
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