Sam Felix is a civil rights lawyer from Cambria Heights who paints when she’s not litigating, and she intended for her warmly colored, Diego Rivera-esque depiction of a Q110 bus to appear inside the new terminal at JFK Airport, part of its call for artists to respond to the endless concrete world around the city’s busiest airport.

But fate instead took her stirringly titled “Hurry Up! You’re Gonna Miss The Bus” to the walls of a public library, right above the fiction collection, and two blocks down the street from her home. It’s JFK’s loss.

“I’m happier that it’s here with everyone else’s art from the community,” Felix told the Chronicle at the opening, last weekend, of “Express Freely,” the second show in as many years put on by Marissa Lowe, a painter and art consultant, and lifelong Cambria Heights-resident.

“I wanted to paint the Q110, because it felt like it represented what life is like over here in Southeast Queens,” said Felix.

“The trains don’t go out that far, so we’ve often just got to take the bus,” she said.

The painting, taken up by the familiar white and blue length of an MTA bus, is a small mural of cultural observation, from the exaggerated, wide-eyed faces in the windows to the soaring jet plane above.

It’s now among the 48 paintings Lowe selected for her second show at the Cambria Heights branch of the Queens Public Library, which will remain installed above the bookshelves until Sept. 30.

In their way, the paintings complement the library’s permanent art collection, namely “All the Things You Are,” a series of 55 birch panels that hang over the children’s section, the work of Barbara Ellmann, an artist who works at the Whitney and whose abstractions have also been commissioned by the MTA and the city of Summit, NJ.

The juxtaposition is moving.

“This is a chance to show artists who don’t get to see their work in a gallery in Manhattan,” said Danielle Robinson, one of the librarians at Cambria Heights.

“Usually when you go to a gallery in Chelsea or the Lower East Side, it’s usually drawing in a lot of Euro-centric people, and that art is inaccessible in neighborhoods like mine,” said Lowe. “This gives our community an equal chance to just see great art by people who look just like them.”

What unifies Lowe’s show is not so much a shared visual language, as a shared ethnography; a presentation of the city’s Black diaspora and the way it stretches from the Bronx down to South Brooklyn and Queens.

It’s the subject of a trio of paintings by Aaron Brown, “born into the foster care system” in East New York, as a line in his bio reads.

“Each of these paintings represent a different part of that diaspora,” Brown told the Chronicle, before breaking down their rich symbolic register at great length.

“You’re the first person to say it’s Basquiat,” Lowe said, with a smile, pointing at another painting she selected, a canvas by the Bronx painter Rafael Caraballo, a riff on the ’80s painter’s signature style, but now imaginatively adorning a dinosaur.

“Everyone just says its Jay-Z,” Lowe said with a smile.

But its an easy mistake to make. The other month, Caraballo had just been commissioned to personalize a few baseball bats for the rapper’s shows at Yankee Stadium. But the dinosaur, that’s all Caraballo

“I chose that because that’s Reptar, from the ‘Rugrats,’” he explains.

Lowe’s own paintings — some four of which appear in the show — are part of that same language too, depicting various pop culture symbols, from the rapper J. Cole to late Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant to a version of Wonder Woman that she modeled off herself.

Everyone has their idols. Lowe says she’s going to be working on a painting of the victorious Knicks next.