Specter is multi-disciplinary on the street, including sculptural installations, photography, and hand-painted large-scale one-off wheat pastes. It was the latter practice that first drew us into his personal stories and portraits on the streets in the 2000s, enlarged versions of people you might meet in the neighborhood. There was the guy with a grocery cart full of recyclable bottles, the food delivery dude on a bicycle, the burly homeless gent wrapped in a red blanket.

These are everyday people on the streets of Brooklyn, and Specter elevates them for passersby to stop and consider.

For his PERSON OF INTEREST Specter is painting another Brooklyn artist as a way of honoring the thousands who have made a thriving and buoyant scene in the 1990s-2010s in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Gowanus, BedStuy, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint – similar in many ways to Berlin’s neighborhoods of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, Schöneberg and Mitte.

To find his portrait subject, Specter just looked next door to his studio. “Sally Montana is my neighbor. She is from Germany but lives in Brooklyn and is a professional photographer and one of the nicest people anyone could ever meet. The reason I choose her is because I feel she embodies this project. The connection between NY and Berlin art communities being the two of the largest in the world and the back-and-forth sharing of people and influences from each others cultures.”

Specter in Brooklyn  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Specter in Brooklyn  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Check out the Facebook page for PERSONS OF INTEREST

See Full Press Release HERE