The Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Art Services and Exhibitions Department curates a year-round program of exhibitions, performances, lectures, panel discussions, and community art projects. All of these are free and open to the public.
We also maintain a special collection of over 2,200 works of art. The collection includes works on paper, photographs, artists’ books, and small sculptures, with a focus on African American, Latino, and Miami artists. Additionally, the Vasari Project is an archive that documents the development of the visual arts in Miami-Dade County since 1945. It contains correspondence, press clippings, photographs, oral histories and other materials. The public may access both of these collections for research and reference.
For more information, contact Art Services at 305-375-5048 or art@mdpls.org, and contact the Vasari Project at 305-375-1550 or vasari@mdpls.org
Main Library, 1st Floor Exhibition Space
April 18 - June 22
Flora Cohen’s drawing and installation work is often populated by fierce and valorous women who take on unusual roles: nuns, bullfighters and popes. For Exquisite Bestiary, Cohen stepped outside the grownup constraints of the art world to make new work by playing poetry and Exquisite Corpse games with her four and six-year-old cousins, Simon and Jose Cohen. The result is a series of rhyming lines and fanciful beasts divided like puzzle pieces into a head, body and legs. Cohen, originally from Colombia, created the pieces for the Library’s 2008 Art of Storytelling International Festival, which features Medellin, Colombia.
Flora Cohen, Dishwasher, 2008, ink on paper.
Stories from the Florida Vault
From the Helen Muir Florida Collection of the Miami-Dade Public Library System
Main Library – 2nd Floor Exhibition Space
March 3 - August 25
The Florida Collection has a story to tell. Vintage tourism and hotel brochures, steamship schedules (dating back to the time when Miami was marketed as a package destination with Havana and Nassau), sheet music, posters, and photographs put the Sunshine State in the context of its time, and reflect the evolution of public taste. This assortment of Floridiana follows the history of our fascinating state through artifacts of its tourism, commerce, culture, and everyday life.
Cover of 1909 dime novel.
Agustín Fernandez: Translating Martí from the Permanent Collection of the Miami-Dade Public Library System
Through June 1, 2008
West Dade Regional Branch,
9445 Coral Way, Miami –
305-535-1134
The late Agustín Fernandez’s intriguing portfolio of lithographs, 20 Años de Exilio 1959-1979, juxtaposes 18 of José Martí’s best-loved poems with Fernandez’s surreal dream imagery. The poems were translated from Spanish to English by Cuban-American children, ages 8-16, from Paris, Havana and Miami.
