For Peter Guppy, the owner of Prosperity Hardware, in Brooklyn, the American Dream is an organizing principle. “The American Dream gives you the opportunity to achieve things,” Guppy, who emigrated with his family from Trinidad, in the seventies, declares with unflinching conviction in “Peter’s Painting,” a short documentary from the Brooklyn-based production company Rota6 Films. Nestled between a driving school and a luxury apartment building in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the hardware store is aptly named for all the things Guppy’s mother imagined that the United States represented: prosperity, wealth, a good life. When his quest for these aims took Guppy down a new avenue of art collecting—which he calls both a hobby and an adventure—he came to be the owner of a painting with a murky provenance, one that he thought could be the work of a Russian master.
Read the full article on the New Yorker website here.
