Told, Retold: The Pedagogy of Knowing and Becoming

This group exhibition features work created during the 2024–2025 school year and parallel ProjectArt Residency, including pieces by Resident Teaching Artists Agua Dulce, Ashley Castañeda, Isabella Marie García, Jevon Brown, Katherine “Neco” Kafruni, and their students from the Kendall, Naranja, Shenandoah, Culmer/Overtown, and North Central Branches of the Miami-Dade Public Library System.

The experience of knowing and becoming is both subject and material in this collection of Resident Artists’ new works, where they engage literacy and personal storytelling through content and form. Hand-bound books, stenciled text, and reimagined moments emphasize a collective drive to seek personal authorship over one’s lived narrative. Ancestral, subjective, otherworldly, and culturally responsive stories move across fiber, furniture, paper, wood, and light. Drawing from family archives, memories, the impact of censorship on youth, and personal mythologies rooted in place: tunnel books playfully reveal fantastical tales of the Everglades; child-like, sculptural creatures welcome you in; handcrafted lightboxes offer a curated peek into a road trip between lovers in the 1990s; while quilts and reimagined furniture encourage you share in the nostalgia of youthful wonder. From Peruvian inspired folklore to call-to-action silkscreen banners, Told and Retold highlights the brilliance of how local artists and youth can weave stories together, through inspiring, educating, and mentoring, often surprisingly in both directions. Youth have the indelible ability to remind us of what it means to become who we are, reflect on how we ourselves arrived, to remember what we wish we knew then, and that we have the privilege to share now.

Featured student work is integral to this exhibition, selected through a student-led curatorial process during in-class showcase workshops. Each young artist curated one to two personal works reflecting their creative explorations throughout the year, guided by the practices of their Resident Teaching Artist and encouraged to consider the librarian as a space for research, inspiration, and creation. Ranging from collaborative quilts to drawings, handmade books, paper weavings, performance art, ceramics, abstract paintings, and stop-motion video, these works resonate with the exhibition’s core themes of storytelling, cultural memory, and the lifelong practice of learning. Presented side by side, the work of students and residents form a layered, intergenerational dialogue grounded in the development of personal artistic expression, art history knowledge, and the value in acquiring foundational visual art skills.

Told and Retold asks viewers to reflect on the ways in which we learn when we teach, we teach when we learn, and how stories nourish growth across generations. The knowledge gained from both subjective and objective accounts is what we have a responsibility to absorb, retain, and pass on, in order for it to spread its tendrils into the collective consciousness. This foundation is of a liberatory pedagogy, one that encourages minds that dare to dream, embrace mistakes as a means to grow, and build a boundless practice of imagining a better world. By embedding artists in community-centered institutions, ProjectArt hopes to empower young people by recognizing them as collaborators, transforming classrooms into studios, and utilizing libraries as sites of radical imagination. We hope we can help be a part of teaching our youth how to become.

Libraries have long been vital community anchors—places where young people can learn, imagine, and find belonging. Today, as library funding continues to disappear, these safe spaces are under threat. ProjectArt partners with libraries to stand in the gap, offering free, holistic art programs that nurture young voices, build new ideas, and strengthen community ties. We hope to amplify the critical role libraries play in our neighborhoods, and encourage you to support and engage with their efforts to continue to exist.