The Free Portrait Project: South Brooklyn

Project details match catalog

About

I'm a portrait painter giving FREE oil­-painted portraits from life– with in-the-moment recorded oral histories– to 200 residents of South Brooklyn, New York in 2023-- to help neighbors say hello to one another.

Impact

I aim to connect neighbors & end a history of portraits only for a wealthy few, giving them freely to people from all walks of life, service assignments & public receptions, & sharing the oral histories with the Brooklyn Public Library.

Progress

I've raised $30K towards my 104K goal. I've painted 129 out of 200 portraits to date. I've partnered with the Brooklyn Nets & Center for Brooklyn History, held 8 public receptions, with 5 concurrent exhibitions up in Brooklyn Public Library branches.

Team

I have proof of concept. "Founded in 2015, Rusty Zimmerman’s 200 portraits of Crown Heights residents exhibited at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, BK Borough Hall, & Brooklyn Museum." I'm an open interviewer, a quick painter, & a conduit for community.

Funding

No displayed figures preserved for this project.

Season totals as displayed on the platform's public accounting — not a statement of amounts paid out. V2 = Venus sales + Venus extras. The original page also broke each season down by fund drive and showed an Available (unclaimed) balance; that level of detail survives only on the preserved snapshots.

Leaderboard page (offline): https://artizen.fyi/projects/the-free-portrait-project-south-brooklyn
Wayback: leaderboard page ↗ · Wayback: platform page ↗

Not recovered: creator, tags, links, funding, drives, submissions, snapshot. Sources: "snapshot" = verbatim Internet Archive page · "platform metadata" = archived artizen.fund page metadata · "leaderboard" = the artizen.fyi public accounting tables · "match catalog" = the platform's public fund-matching catalog (captured 2026-10-15, generated 2026-09-07) · "community catalog" = a June 2026 platform scrape preserved in a community repo.