Born in Peru and uprooted at age 6 by parents fleeing the political and economic upheaval of the late 1970s, artist William Cordova grew up poor in some of South Florida's grittiest neighborhoods. His struggling parents could not afford to buy their five children fancy toys or a television set, and Cordova's older brothers and sisters taught him to draw to keep him entertained.

''I learned to use my imagination out of practicality,'' Cordova, 37, said from a remote outpost in the mountains of New Hampshire, where he's doing a residency at the MacDowell Colony.

An internationally acclaimed conceptual artist, Cordova has come home this week to exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach's prestigious Art Kabinett his metaphoric project Moby Dick (Tracy) (after ishmael, chico de cano y carl hampton) -- an installation that fuses urban culture and literary references to explore issues of power.

The installation has as its centerpiece a scrapped police car cut in half, its engine missing. The vehicle has been transformed into a storage place or sitting room for books and graffiti drawings that merge Cordova's trans-cultural experiences, connecting historical figures as disparate as Black Panthers founder Eldridge Cleaver and the Mexican Nobel laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz.

''It's actually a place for contemplation, meditation, and you can't really access the inside of the car directly, but you can look through the tinted windows,'' Cordova said. ``I grew up in Opa-locka and Little Haiti making language and visual relations with other communities, with other people, all the time. For me, it's a reality.''

Cordova has come a long way from the days when he rode on Metro buses and waited for the driver to take his lunch break so he could tape his posters denouncing corruption in Miami over the buses' advertisements.

He's exhibited at New York's Whitney Biennial, the Prague Triennial, the 50th Venice Biennale and selective spaces such as P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and The Studio Museum in Harlem. But he's the same ''subversive'' artist who, as his Miami Dade College art teacher Robert Thiele put it, ``pushed the parameters as far as he could.''

Once while a student at MDC's North Campus, Cordova asked for the painting studio key because he wanted to work on weekends.

''I gave him the key, and then I found out he had moved in and was sleeping in the studio,'' Thiele said.

Another time, when they were in the New York area at the same time, Thiele invited Cordova for a drink at a bar near his Brooklyn loft. Cordova didn't show up.

'The next day he calls and tells me, `I spent the night on your roof!' '' Thiele recalled. ``I think he's doing that still. . . . He enjoys that idea that he's kind of on the edge.''

ON THE MOVE

Cordova says he considers South Florida home, but he hasn't stayed put in years.

He travels from residency to residency, driving from Chicago to Maine, from Houston to San Antonio, from New Jersey to New Hampshire, with all his possessions -- ''mainly art materials,'' he said -- in his 1995 Voyager van.

He shuns local representation by dealers because he wants to be free to produce art that's socially meaningful and not created under market pressures.

''Classic William,'' Thiele said.

For Cordova, art is about ``developing the ideas, the concepts.

''It's very important that I made a conscious decision to never rely on my artwork to make a living, because that which we make a living out of, we also rely on, and it means we need to keep creating to produce. And that cuts into the idea of personal research, creativity, time off,'' Cordova said. ``Art becomes a rigorous job, and I don't want to bring that into my practice.''

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