Willie Weaver-Bey is an artist, veteran and community leader. He spent 40 years in federal prison on drug charges, where he discovered his artistic voice and first picked up his paint brushes. When he was released from prison, authorities put him on a bus to Milwaukee, where he’d been arrested years before, and where he didn’t know anyone, really. He’s made thousands of artworks over the years, he says, and today his Sherman Park home is filled with scores of them, including a portrait of his mother that hangs in a place of honor near the front door. He won a national art contest for a self-portrait titled “Thank you for seeing me as a veteran and not a homeless man.”