By COLlive reporter
Brooklyn Children’s Museum in Crown Heights will exhibit works by artist Rusty Zimmerman‘s Free Portrait Project illustrating the diversity of the people and cultures that make up the neighborhood.
In one year, Zimmerman crowdfunded to paint 200 oil-painted portraits of local individuals, recording the audio from each session in a joint oral history of the neighborhood in partnership with the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Weeksville Heritage Center.
Each painting was rendered in four hours while a microphone recorded the session and it will all be presented at an opening reception at the museum this Sunday, September 25 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. The public is welcome.
The exhibit opening will be feted by a parade starting at 4pm at the Bedford Union Armory and culminate at the museum with the 200 local residents depicted in the portraits with their families and representatives from local office.
“Brooklyn Children’s Museum is thrilled to be hosting The Free Portrait Project, highlighting the contributions of so many extraordinary members of our our community,” says Stephanie Wilchfort, President & CEO of Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Local exhibitions of the portraits ran concurrently at the museum and 10 other local venues, storefronts to synagogues, with free public receptions for all the communities of Crown Heights to promote dialogue through story sharing and acts of service assigned to each participant.
Lubavitch residents of Crown Heights are also included, such as Rabbi Shea Hecht, Mrs. Devorah Halberstam, Yaakov Behrman and others.
One of Zimmerman’s favorite portraits in the series is of “Charlie Buttons,” the colorful figure whose clothes are adorned in button-pins and attends all the life-cycle events in the neighborhood every day.
“I caught up with him at a wedding to ask him to sit for a portrait, and he arrived for his sitting with a bag of smoked fish he brought from having come straight from a bris,” Zimmerman says.
“What we’ve been trying to do for 10 years, connecting community across cultures, this project has done overnight,” commented Arna Lipkind of Project CARE. District Leader Geoffrey Davis said: “Rusty brought an entire community together.”
“We’ve celebrated for the diversity of cultures– Hasidic, West-Indian, a flood of recent arrivals– all more or less peacefully co-existing, but we don’t interact and say hello to one another as well as we could. I’d like to change that,” Zimmerman said.
We see you in the painting! Keep up the good work.
what an amazing exhibit,
now i want travel to ch just to take a selfie
with that remarkable back drop.