The Bridge Tender House is a streamlined-style, stainless-steel building from which bridge tenders once operated a drawbridge over the Miami River. It was installed in 1939 and partially funded by the Public Works Administration, a program within President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to help the nation recover from the Great Depression. The structure is a showpiece of Art Deco design. Saved from destruction in 1993, it was donated to the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum in Miami Beach, where it stands in front of the main building and is used for various projects. Currently at the Bridge Tender House, artist Rosemarie Chiarlone's Mapping Trajectories. Read More
Rosemarie Chiarlone’s LANDscape stripped back to the natural building blocks (literally) of a city’s urban creation. Using cinder blocks she originally found near her home, Chiarlone arranged her own urban environment– speaking to the fragility of both natural and constructed environments. Read More
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. Read More