One’s relationship to the place where they live largely depends upon their privilege, stemming either from the environment they were born into or the circumstances affecting their life. Either way, the experience of any one place is different for every person inhabiting that place. Rankings like those provided by US News incorporate metrics considering cost of living, median income, and travel time to work when determining the overarching quality of life a place provides to its residents on average. Major cities like New York run a massive gamut, hosting the ultra-wealthy, those below the poverty line, and everyone in between.
Miami is also a city of tremendous dichotomies. Famed for its nightlife, celebrities, and of course, the world-renowned Art Basel festival, its identity in the larger cultural lexicon centers around glamor. But like New York and every other city, the reality beyond that reputation is rather mundane: Miami is a city of 464,000 living their daily lives.
Spanish street artist Jofre Oliveras often contemplates how greater societal problems express themselves within the simple reality of daily life in his work. His latest mural, titled ‘American Dream’ and painted in Miami, addresses the litany of struggles faced by the city’s residents who live outside our preconceived notions of Miami.
‘American Dream’ features Oliveras’s signature style, at once painterly yet strikingly realistic. His treatment of the individuals he depicts contributes to their realism.
Of the mural, Oliveras writes, “This represents a real homeless from Miami painted on an abandoned asylum of the Liberty City neighborhood, one slum of Miami. The city is well known for her tourist night life, the sun and beaches, Wynwood murals and Art Basel. But there is a more realistic face of Miami that we can see through people living in the streets.”
The individual lays comfortably. Oliveras’s masterful hand depicts their form as one actually sleeps, rather than in the idyllic fairytale lounge often found in our mind’s eye. Lazily reclining on one elbow, poignantly cuddling an American flag, their face portrays that this rest is much-needed. Life seems to have left the sleeper weary.
