Recent Acquisitions from the Permanent Collection of the Miami-Dade Public Library System
January 4 – May 3
West Dade Regional, 9445 Coral Way, Miami - 305-553-1134

The Library’s permanent art collection focuses on works on paper, photographs, and artists’ books, multiples, and publications. Much of the work references language, literature, or Miami life and history. This exhibition highlights new additions to the collection from 2006 to the present, including work by Christian Marclay, Mickey Smith, Tauba Auerbach, Julieta Aranda, Michelle Weinberg, and many others.

Gullah Geechee and the 7 Dreams
Curated by Gary Moore
January 23 – March 31  

Reception: Thursday, January 28th, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Main Library, 2nd floor exhibition space, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami – 305-375-2665

Multidisciplinary artist Gary Moore is nationally recognized for his permanent public art installations and interventions that join African American pop culture and architectural context. For Gullah Geechee and the 7 Dreams, Moore curates an exhibition from the permanent art collection of the Miami-Dade Public Library System through the lens of the interests and influences that inform his work as an artist. This cultural framework includes South Carolina low country Gullah Geechee Culture, the anthropological writings of Zora Neale Hurston, the culturally-specific minimalist conceptual work of David Hammond, and the fiction of Toni Morrison. Bound together by the metaphysical connections between folk culture, low country mysticism, histories of slavery and revolution, and handmade aesthetics, the exhibition includes work by Kabuya Pamela Bowens, Carlos Alfonzo, Ana Mendieta, and Elizabeth Catlett, among many others.

With support from Alternate ROOTS, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Love and Respect for Self and Community: Struggles for Justice in Miami-Dade Neighborhoods

January 9 - May 5
North Dade Regional Library, 2455 NW 183 Street, Miami – 305-625-6424
February 6 – May 5
Culmer/Overtown – 350 NW 13 Street - 305-579-5322

Residents of Little Havana, Overtown, and Homestead/Florida City took vivid photographs depicting their everyday lives. The exhibition is a collaborative project between researchers at the Research Institute for Social and Economic Policy at Florida State University and community members from Power U Center for Social Change, Vecinos Unidos and We Count!.

Morris Rosen: Sensing Structures
January 28 – March 1

Workshop and Reception: February 24th, 6:30-8:30pm
Kendall Branch – 9101 SW 97 Avenue – 305.279.0520

Morris Rosen, a 92 year old retired building contractor who specialized in commercial and high-rise office towers, creates his own sculptural folk art of buildings and other structures with simple tools such as tools such as glue and coffee stirs.  Rosen, who is legally blind, crafts most of his sculptures simply by using his sense of touch. The exhibition consists of 3-D architectural sculptures of houses, inventive buildings, and well-known monuments. 

There Goes the Neighborhood

Miami Beach Regional Library, Storytelling Room
October 14 – February 28, 2010

Miami artists Mary Malm, Brian Reddy, Claudia Scalise, and Tom Virgin collaborate on an exhibition that explores the idea of “the neighborhood” from divergent perspectives: from displacement and gentrification, to the intimacy of home and family, to physical and human neighborhoods. The show includes works on paper, artists’ books, a painting installation, and small sculpture. 

Mary Malm, Birthday Cake, 2007, oil on panel.

The White Dragon
By Phaedra Robinson
February 11 -  April 8

Reception and artist’s talk:
Thursday, February 11th, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Main Library, 1st floor exhibition space, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami – 305-375-2665

The White Dragon is a mural-sized painting of a striking image literally written into being. Its imagery is based on the concept of a written sentence moving from left to right across the picture plane, but with a forceful motion simulating a force of nature such as a tornado. The painting is composed of multiple layers of handwritten words and sentence fragments in intensely-colored mixed media on plywood. The artist obscured, erased, and altered the words visually in the service of a new narrative: that of emerging from darkness, discovering clarity, or, as Robinson says, “a presence that comes into its own after a time of repression.”

Angels and Insects by B.A. Bosaiya
February 19 – May 2
Pinecrest Library, 5835 SW 111 Street, Miami – 305-668-4571

B. A. Bosaiya’s black and white photographs portray tiny insects in larger than life, atmospheric portraits that blend fantasy and reality. He makes familiar organisms unfamiliar by portraying them in a cinematic language that is bright, fanciful, sinister, and mysterious.

The Reading Room: A Temporary Space for Artists’ Books, Publications, and Multiples

January 8, Noon – 2pm
February 12, Noon – 2pm
March 12, Noon – 2pm
Main Library, Children’s Room, 101 West Flagler Street, Miami – 305-375-2665

On the above mentioned dates, the storytelling room in the Children’s Room at the Main Library will become The Reading Room. In this cozy, intimate space visitors can get up close and personal with selections from the Library’s collection of artists’ books, publications, and multiples. Experience these objects the way their creators intended: touch them, page through them, look at them closely. There will also be a screening of video and new media art from: Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media.