Overtown
Overtown was once called the "Harlem of the South" — a self-contained Black city within a segregated Miami where Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole performed because no other Miami venue would have them. Interstate construction in the 1960s destroyed the neighborhood's physical fabric. Its murals are an act of recovery — honoring the jazz era, documenting the destruction, and insisting on the community's future.
Featured Artists
All artists →Typoe
Miami-based artist whose work blends graphic elements with text and photographic reference. "The Lyric Theater" is a tribute to the historic venue at 819 NW 2nd Ave — one of the few remaining structures from Overtown's jazz era. Typoe researched the theater's performer history and wove the names and faces of Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and dozens of others into a composition that functions simultaneously as portrait gallery and typographic monument.
Nathalie Alfonso
Cuban-American Miami artist whose work engages with urban planning and its human consequences. "What the Highway Took" documents the destruction wrought by I-95 and I-395 on Overtown — using archival aerial photography as the basis for a mural that shows the neighborhood before and after the highway's construction, the before rendered in warm gold and the after in cold concrete gray.
Addonis Parker
Overtown native and resident who paints the neighborhood's future alongside its past. "Overtown Rising" is his most hopeful work — an Afrofuturist vision of the neighborhood rebuilt and thriving, its architecture drawing on both the jazz-era buildings that were demolished and a speculative Black architecture that never got to exist, rendered in luminous purple and gold.