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By Root 219 0

that he didn’t say a word. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the rendering, though it was clear that Reed had taken great care with it. He had first sketched the outlines of the panther in pencil, using a ruler and right angle, and then had gone to work with oil-based house paint. Because of its permanence, there was little room for error. I assumed at the time that the panther was meant to conjure up more radical days. I later learned, however, that a number of years before a woman had asked Reed to paint a black panther with gold trim on her kitchen wall to match her black and gold furniture, a common color pairing among public-housing residents. (“They all follow that same tradition,” Reed told me.) Word quickly spread, and soon Reed had a reputation. Public-housing residents came to know him as “Mr. Artist”—as in “Mr. Artist, how much you charge for one of them murals?”

Reed, who’s now in his late forties, has salt-and-pepper hair and a trimmed beard and mustache. He likes to talk, and he unabashedly offers his opinions to just about anyone, including to the cadre of young drug dealers outside his building. “They tell me they’re in business,” he says. “I tell ’em they need to get a real job.” Reed’s full-time job is as a maintenance worker at the Dearborn Homes, the public-housing complex where he lives. Since the early 1990s, however, Reed has been kind of a Diego Rivera of the projects, painting the imaginings and realities of the dispossessed, of the men and women who live in America’s poorest neighborhood, an area beset with the kinds of problems one might expect in a place where ninety percent of the families are headed by a single parent and where violence has become such a way of life that a banner on a local church calls for a “Peace Truce” and a local tombstone maker, Elmo’s, advertises, “While U Wait. Before You Go, See Elmo.”

Reed himself grew up in public housing, in the Robert Taylor Homes, a complex of twenty-eight buildings adjacent to Stateway. The Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens stretched over two miles, the longest contiguous alignment of public housing in the world. Reed liked to draw as a kid, and after dropping out of high school, he earned his GED and went on to a junior college, where he took commercial art classes. He then worked for eight years at a graphic arts firm, and while he didn’t particularly like the job—it stifled his creativity, he says—the company did send him to more art classes, where he learned about perspective and composition.

He began his part-time career as a professional artist by painting fairly mundane likenesses: apples, oranges, and peaches in people’s kitchens; cartoon characters like Betty Boop, the Flintstones, and Pikachu on the walls of children’s rooms; fish and dolphins in bathrooms. Also, early on, he was often asked to sketch likenesses of Jesus Christ, but it irked him that virtually everyone wanted Jesus to be white. It was as if people had been beaten down for so long that they no longer believed that anyone who resembled themselves could amount to much. “They’ll say, ‘Why you draw him so dark?’ ” he told me. “I’ll say, ‘Jesus wasn’t really white,’ and they’ll say, ‘Look, I’m paying you, do it the way I say. I know how Jesus look.’ I mean, they probably met Jesus in person, so I can’t argue with them. I give ’em what they want.”

Soon, people began to make personalized requests. First, there were the panthers. Then, of all things, it was landscapes. He remembers the first time it happened. A young woman told Reed she wanted a sky with clouds over water and trees. She said she wanted the sunlight coming off the water. “I said, ‘I understand,’ ” Reed recalls. “ ‘Let me try to make you feel good.’ ” The landscapes caught on. Drab cinderblock walls became lakes surrounded by oak trees. Beaches with palm trees. People so treasured these soothing natural scenes that they’d throw parties where friends could get their pictures taken in front of them. It was as close as many of them would get to finding a refuge from the dankness of their neighborhood.