Women's Voices

Panel Discussion

Join Dr. Amy Galpin, Anita Sharma, and artists Rosemarie Chiarlone, Susan Emery Eisenberg, Charo Oquet, and Chire "VantaBlack" Regans for a discussion on the "Women's Voices" exhibitions on view at the Library. Learn about women's contributions to Miami's art history, and their artistic practices. For more information, please contact 305-375-5572 or specialcollections@mdpls.org. All ages.

This program and the exhibitions were made possible through generous funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs in connection with the Vasari Project archive and to support the Miami Art Timeline project.

Moderator:

Amy Galpin

Amy Galpin, PhD, is the executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College. She was previously the Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum FIU; the Curator at the Rollins Museum of Art; and Associate Curator, Art of the Americas, San Diego Museum of Art.

Her curatorial projects focus on modern and contemporary art of the Americas.

Panelists:

Rosemarie Chiarlone

Rosemarie Chiarlone, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives and works in Miami, Florida. Chiarlone studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Florida International University, receiving a BFA (’74) and MS (’80). She has completed residencies at Deering Estate, Vermont Studio Center, and Oolite Arts (formerly ArtCenter/South Florida). Grants and awards include nominee for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2020), The Villagers, Inc. Grant, Florida Artists’ Book Prize, Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, Florida Visual Arts Fellowship, and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is in the collections of Yale University Beinecke Library, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Center for Book Arts, NYC, Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Bainbridge Island Museum, The Arthur & Mata Jaffe Collection of Books as Aesthetic Objects, Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Girls Club/Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection, The Mosquera Collection, Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design, Princess Caroline of Monaco, and in numerous national university and college special collections and archives.

Susan Emery Eisenberg

Born in Wisconsin and now living and working in South Florida, Susan Emery Eisenberg creates two and three-dimensional artwork on various forms of mixed media. She held several positions with the Woman's Caucus for Art, both the Miami and Florida Chapters, culminating in her being the Chairwoman of the President's Council for the Woman's Caucus For Art, Miami, in 1994. 

Charo Oquet

Dominican born, lives and works in Miami, FL. BFA, FIU 2000. She uses painting, installation, performance, photography and film, to investigate issues of the displacement, identity, migration, gender, and culture and to document and reflect on issues of de-colonial aesthetics.

Awards include: MIA, 22, 23; No-Vacancy, 2022; FL; Bass Museum -New Sculpture, 2022; Ellies Creator Award 2020; Knight Challenge ’19, Perez Family Foundation Create ’19, NALAC ’19. Recent Solo exhibitions: No-Vacancy, 2022; Bass Museum 2022, Dimensions Variable Gallery, 2020; Lummus Park, 2019. Select international exhibitions: Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Museum of Latin American Art, Ca.; Mujeres Al Lente en la Fotografia Dominicana, curator: Carlos Acero, Museum of Modern Art of The Dominican Rep.; Ping-Pong-Basel-’21- M54, Basel, Switzerland
Oquet’s work is in several museum collections: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Frost Art Museum, FIU, FL; CAAM, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Spain; Bass Museum of Art, Florida; New Zealand National Museum, N.Z.; Dowse Art Museum, NZ; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; Foresight Collection, NZ; Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, DR.

Chire "VantaBlack" Regans

Artist Chire “VantaBlack” Regans’ art practice exists at the intersection of social justice and storytelling. Her work responds to urgent societal concerns and functions as a critical platform to amplify the voices of community members who are often silenced. Over the past decade, Chire has focused primarily on community advocacy and depicting social narratives without distortion in various mediums. As a Saint Louis native, the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement triggered a sense of urgency in her art practice. Her work continues to evolve, allowing for broader social accessibility and creative scale. In South Florida, Chire continues to merge her artistic practice with community-led activism, emphasizing the art of storytelling as a means of engaging with communities with radical empathy and transparency.

Anita Sharma

Anita Sharma is a Visual Arts Archivist with over twenty years of experience specializing in artists’ and community-based archives, digital archiving, legacy preservation initiatives, and curatorial projects. In 2017, she founded WAAM (Women Artists Archive Miami), an online digital archive dedicated to preserving the artistic contributions of women and non-binary arts practitioners. She has worked at libraries, archives, museums, and private collections in the US, England, and India, including the British Library, the Arani & Shumita Bose Collection, Rubell Collection, Debra & Dennis Scholl Collection, Zarina Hashmi Archive, Frost Art Museum, Oolite Arts, South Asia Institute, and SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature & Arts Archive), among others.

About the Vasari Project:

The Vasari Project is a library collection at Main Library dedicated to documenting, collecting, and preserving Miami-Dade County's art history from 1945 to the present. It is a living archive that grows through contributions from artists, art professionals, exhibition spaces, galleries, institutions, and private donors.

The Vasari Project is a resource for ongoing research, scholarship, publications, artists' projects, exhibitions, and events. The archive collects documentation rather than original works of art composed primarily of printed matter: correspondence, press clippings, photographs, posters, books, exhibition catalogs, artists' files, oral histories, and other ephemeral materials.

About the Division of Special Collections & Archives:

Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Division of Special Collections & Archives is located at the Main Library and holds rare and irreplaceable historical materials for the benefit of the public and scholarly community. They oversee the Helen Muir Florida Collection, 16mm Film Collection, Cuban Collection of Rare Books & Ephemera, Genealogy Collection, Vasari Project archive, and Rare & Antiquarian books from as early as the 17th century. The Division aims to provide the public with the contents of these collections at their request, which include books, original manuscripts, over 18,000 photographs, prints, artifacts, audiovisual resources, and electronic media. 

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