Dominating one of Jimmy James Greene's huge mosaic panels in the Utica Avenue station is a plump yellow angel on rollerblades. Perhaps more than any image in the ten panels that compose “Children's Cathedral,” this demonstrates the artist's intentions: to reflect the desires, dreams and memories of the community's children in their own drawings. "At first," he says, "I talked with the kids about how they play, learn, pray, and celebrate. Then they drew." What emerged were images of the neighborhood: shops, a woman pushing a baby carriage, a teacher in class, plants, flowers, and, most of all, children in action: singing in choir, jumping rope, reading, riding bikes. The artist took hundreds of the children's images and arranged them into eight groupings, adding color to the pencil drawings. "They were the soloists," he says, "I was the orchestra leader."

Jimmy James Greene is an artist and educator from New York City. After apprenticing with acclaimed afro-centric muralist Jon Onye Lockhard in Ann Arbor Michigan, Greene graduated from The Rhode Island School of Design. Since then he has gone on to become an accomplished collagist, painter, draftsman and designer who works with stained glass, print making and mosaic tile. For decades his work has explored the communal expressions of the African Diaspora in general and those of the African American experience. His work has been shown in over 30 one-person exhibitions and innumerable group showings.