When photographer Wing Young Huie moved to a neighborhood along Minneapolis’s Lake Street, he began taking pictures. When he stopped--four years and twenty thousand frames later--he displays 675 photographs in store windows, bus stops, on the sides of buses and abandoned buildings along the six-mile length of the same street. The result was one of the most remarkable public art projects in recent memory.

This epic gallery of images ranging in size from 8 by 12 inches to 8 by 12 feet, reflected the dizzying mixture of socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural realities that encompass the dozen disparate neighorhoods connect by a singular street. Accompanying many photos are the words of the people in the pictures talking about their lives and neighborhood, excerpted from hundreds of interviews that Huie conducted. This monumental yet accessible exhibition paints a profound, sad, and often humorous and joyful look at the diversity of the American city.

In a comment book placed at a Lake Street coffeehouse, an anonymous person wrote: ‘Where art is not afraid to look into the eyes of us, regular poor folks just living our lives, this art comes down from the pretentious, self-conscious and exclusive upper-class realm and becomes community art, art with a purpose, humane. These are the pictures you’ll never see in Nike ads or car ads or perfume ads. These are the majority of Americans picking up their broken identities and trying to scrape together a living, a culture, and identity, a life. Most of the images we see are of advertisements, trying to sell us a euphoria and prestige we could never achieve. We look around us and are disappointed; we struggle but don’t measure up. These photos show us, real and valuable just as we are. They are sad because they aren’t the perfect images of others we’re used to seeing. They are empowering for the same reason. Thanks, for these images and a chance to respond. Peace."