Dizzy's Welcomes the Freaks

The freaks are coming to Park Slope.

Thanks to art-supporting co-owner, Matheo Pisciotta, one can save the subway trip to Coney Island this summer and feast on the diner’s “finer” fare in the shadow of Electra the Electric Lady and Serpentina the Snake Lady.

The two acts of the borough’s famous boardwalk Sideshow are just a sampling of those in the upcoming installation of Coney Island Museum artist-in-residence Marie Roberts’ work that will grace the walls of the Ninth Street restaurant from August 1 through November 4.

The show will include two four-foot studies of the 80-foot banner Roberts paints to announce the Sideshow to passersby on the side of the building that houses the carnival act at Surf Avenue and West 12th Street in Coney Island, as well as a number of 16 by 16 individual banner paintings on wood. Prices will vary, starting from around $200.

Roberts is just the kind of artist Dizzy’s was looking for when they hired local curator Michele Jaslow of Radar Curatorial last year to help find fun, fabulous art to fill its walls (while still keeping with its Park Slope family values).

 “I love that it’s big and bold and colorful and whimsical, that it’s Coney Island, that it’s Brooklyn,” said Pisciotta in characteristic effusiveness. “I love that it’s our neighborhood.”   

In the 14 years since it opened its doors as a Park Slope staple, Dizzy’s has supported and featured the work of many local area artists and musicians, many of them employees.

Its latest star, Roberts, is a third generation Brooklynite whose family moved out of Park Slope in 1889 (sadly, she laments, before real estate values skyrocketed.)

As she tells it, Roberts actually “ran away from the Sideshow to become an artist.”

In the 1920s, her father was a chauffeur for a major Sideshow performer and her uncle was the talker (“the one who stands outside and talks you into the show,” she said).

Roberts’ family history and her work are even featured in a documentary short, "Sideshow Picasso," by "Mad Hot Ballroom" director Marilyn Agrelo.

It wasn’t until the early '90s, though, when she read about the Coney Island USA art center started by Dick Zigun to offer free and low-cost programs associated with the Sideshow, that Roberts even considered connecting herself to the one-time family business.

Zigun needed a mural painter, and so she took on the job.

Now, 15 years later, when she is not working as a professor of art at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, she can be found at her Coney Island studio in the landmarked former Childs Restaurant building, amidst her many depictions of those that make their living off their unusual attributes.

“Freaks are people just like anyone else,” she said in great defense of the images she emblazons on her banners, of those like Violetta, a living torso with no arms and no legs, and The Smallest Perfect Man.

Apparently, according to her uncle’s old address book, many of the Sideshow performers once lived in Park Slope, at the time considered “downtown.”

This year’s banner is an homage to banner painters of old and the acts they depicted, like the Blockhead, an act Roberts describes as “somebody who pounds steel spikes into their head and lives to talk about it.”

For Roberts, who grew up in Brooklyn without visiting a Manhattan museum until she was 19, her public Sideshow banners are art for the everyman, “for people, like my mother, who never graduated fourth grade, or for graduates of Yale.”

The installation, which runs August 1 through November 4, can be viewed at any day of the week or during Tuesday nights when it features young jazz trio, The Jazz Generation.