CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Build it and they won't come.

Jacobo Borges heard that when he and his friends unveiled plans to build an art museum smack in the middle of Catia (kah-TEE-ah), a teeming, crime-ridden Caracas slum of two million people.

Not too many people would push their way past the crumbling brick shacks, aggressive street vendors, beggars, drug addicts, trash and broken glass just to see a painting.

But six years later, the Jacobo Borges Museum is one of most celebrated in South America - and not just because the neighborhood went bad.

At 70, Borges - Catia native, painter, set designer and plastic artist whose works are prized worldwide - has realized an ambitious vision: Bring the art home; inspire aspirations to success among fellow "Catienses"; endow this slum, one of countless thousands in Latin America, with a sense of identity; and tackle its problems - drug addiction, school dropouts, abandoned street urchins.

Borges, who splits his time living in Germany, New York City and Caracas, didn't simply just lend his name to the project. He gave weekly talks to his former neighbours about the importance of art to their lives, and how it allowed him to escape the clutches of poverty.

Growing up in Catia, Borges worked as a mechanic, a waiter and fetcher of tennis balls at tennis clubs to pay for his art classes.

"Jacobo was essential to linking the museum to the community," says director Adriana Meneses. "He told the people about his experience in overcoming the local culture and how art opened the world to him." True to his vision, the work of Catia artists is featured in the museum's permanent collection. Visitors also are treated to pieces by more renowned national artists - albeit in temporary exhibits.

More than 100 poor children and adults study painting, drawing, photography, theatre and dance at classes held in the museum. Instructors take their courses to the city's streets, teaching children with disabilities and drug addictions.

The success stories are international and, no less important, local.

David Bello, a hamburger vendor whose self-taught mosaics are on display at the museum, recently sold his first piece in the United States. Bello's intricate mosaics depict scenes from his neighbourhood - themes such as crime and AIDS. His material is Catia's debris: bits of plastic from bottles and telephone cards.

Bello says his art reflects "the absurdities of society, and go further than denouncing such problems as violence, illness and hunger. They have a strong desire for transformation." A 1999 exhibit titled "Children of the Street" featured photography, paintings and essays by 7- to 12-year-olds who were rescued from the streets by the government.

For many locals, the museum is a welcome escape from a hand-to-mouth existence in a nation whose majority live on less than $2 a day.

"I try to come two or three times a month because among so many problems, it's necessary to take a break," says Esperanza Morales, a housekeeper who lives in a shack near the museum. "Art has no class distinction. It's for people who have sensitivity, and not just for those who have money." The community engagement is mutual: Catia, and its aspirations, have compelled the Borges Museum to change its mission. By year's end, its staff will embark on a project to encourage residents to create "micro-museums" in the district's neighborhoods.

The idea is to create "a collective memory among Catienses," Meneses says.