Stories don’t always vanish. Sometimes, they get paved over. In Miami Beach, where buildings rise quickly and memory is easily rebranded, I’ve learned to look for gestures that insist on preservation, not through spectacle, but through repetition, care, and language.
Artist Rosemarie Chiarlone’s longtime preoccupation with language as line, image, and texture is present in every work. Words are carved, perforated, or implied—never fully delivered. Installed at the Miami Beach Regional Library, her exhibition The Story centers on the fragility of cultural memory, taking shape through abstract wall panels, ink-and-salt paintings, a sand installation, and sculptural text drawings excerpted from a poem. Together, these pieces form a textured meditation on what language holds. “I don’t like a lot of words,” she told me during a recent walk-through. “I like it to be very simplistic.” But that simplicity can be deceptive.
Along the gallery’s west wall, Chiarlone presents a series of abstract panels that partially recreate Albert Vrana’s 1962 concrete bas-relief The Story of Man. The original work encircles the nearby rotunda in Collins Park, designed by architect Herbert A. Mathes and once part of the Miami Beach Public Library. “Vrana always ties his work to the meaning of the building,” she told me. “Since there was a library attached to it, he called it The Story of Man.” The rotunda’s textured, abstract design alludes to the role of language, literature, the arts, and philosophy in shaping human civilization. “I love that,” Chiarlone added, “because what is the story of man? It is art, language, stories, history, everything that makes up civilization.”
The exhibition also turns to language. On the north wall, text drawings—phrases such as “From Nothing,” “To Something,” “On the Blue,” “Dot in Space,” “Developing Earth,” and “Being Human”—are excerpted from the poem The Story by Susan Weiner, with whom the artist collaborates. These spare text fragments function like constellations, to be read slowly across space and surface. This fragmentary approach recalls the work of 1960s conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer, who used spare text to prompt active interpretation. Like her predecessors, Chiarlone presents language as something to be decoded rather than simply read.
Other pieces shift the exhibition’s focus outward, toward space, scale, and human perspective. Small, dark paintings made with ink, salt, and mica are inspired by Carl Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, which frames Earth as a fragile point in the universe. At the center of the gallery, a porcelain vessel sits atop a platform covered in pale sand. The vessel is perforated with the words “from nothing.” The sand refers to the subtle, nearly invisible color of space (which is not black!) and to Vrana’s method of casting his bas-reliefs directly into wet sand. From the body to the building to the planet, The Story invites viewers to consider what holds, and what disappears across scale, material, and time.
Having lived in Miami Beach for over 25 years, I often think about what gets remembered and what gets overwritten. Chiarlone’s work doesn’t shout, and maybe that’s why it lingers. In The Story, her careful tension between presence and impermanence becomes a call to attention. At a time when the preservation of culture is increasingly complex, she reminds us that memory isn’t passive but an active, daily practice. And in a place like Miami Beach, that kind of remembering feels both urgent and deeply human.
What:The Story by Rosemarie Chiarlone
When: April 25 - July 17, 2025
Time: Monday to Saturday, 9:30 am to 6:00pm
Where: Miami Beach Regional Library, 227, 22nd Street, Miami Beach, FL, 33139
