The People's Gallery

Down the street, in his graphic design shop on 79th Street where he creates business logos, Weeks displays some of his evocative paintings of windswept rice fields, and of wooden shotgun houses with clotheslines in the yard. The My Dream mural is his first outdoor work in Miami, but he plans to do another in the black Grove that he says will reflect the residents' Bahamian background, like the works in his shop.

"The importance of doing art in the street is to show what art can do, the influence it can have on the community," he stresses. "The ironic thing is, this work would never exist if it had to be created within the bureaucracy of certain municipalities, if the artists had to subscribe to their regulations. There are certain neighborhoods that just won't allow it, so most of it is in the inner city, in the black neighborhoods.

"Unfortunately, there's not a lot of interrelationship between the neighborhoods," Weeks adds. "People say, 'Are you crazy? I'm not going there,' so they're never going to see any of this. They're really missing something.