Inside Amalia Pica’s Interactive New Installation at The Bass

Opening September 17, Amalia Pica’s “Lecturas Posibles” transforms The Bass’s newly activated Rotunda into an immersive, ever-changing library where visitors are invited to draw, write, erase, and collectively rethink how knowledge and meaning are made.

Whitewall

August 21, 2026

When Amalia Pica’s “Lecturas Posibles” opens at The Bass on September 17, it will invite visitors to do something museums do not always encourage: leave their mark. The Argentine-born artist’s new immersive installation will transform The Rotunda, the museum’s recently activated satellite gallery in Collins Park, into an almost two-dimensional library where walls, furniture, bookshelves, and familiar objects become surfaces for drawing and writing.

Rendered in chalkboard paint and traced with hand-drawn white outlines, the installation begins as a precise, monochromatic environment, somewhere between a drawing and a room. But that order is designed to disappear. Visitors will be invited to write, draw, and make marks with colored chalk, gradually transforming the space into an accumulating record of collective expression. What begins with Pica’s authorship will ultimately be reshaped by everyone who enters.

“Lecturas Posibles,” on view through February 12, 2027, brings together many of the central concerns of Pica’s practice—language, communication, learning, participation, and the often unstable process through which people make meaning together. Yet its presentation at The Bass is especially resonant because of the history embedded in the space itself.

A Historic Miami Beach Space Becomes a Living Library

Exhibition view of Amalia Pica, “Lecturas Posibles,” at The Bass, courtesy of the artist and The Bass.

The Rotunda is not simply a new setting for Pica’s installation. Its history is fundamental to the project.

The Bass itself occupies what was originally the Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center, which opened in the 1930s as one of South Florida’s earliest public spaces dedicated to art. In 1962, a new library was constructed in Collins Park, with The Rotunda serving as a gathering space. Although the library was later demolished, the circular structure remained, in part because it is enclosed by Albert Vrana’s concrete bas-relief mural, The Story of Man, a public artwork centered on the enduring importance of writing and words in human existence.

After learning about this history, Pica reimagined a space that had been regularly inaccessible to the public for more than four decades as a communal reading room and a site of shared authorship. Bookshelves, desks, and seating areas made from reclaimed and repurposed objects recall the architecture of a library while gently undoing its conventions. The books in Pica’s world are fused shut; they cannot be read in the traditional sense. Instead, they ask visitors to imagine what might be inside and, more importantly, to consider how knowledge is created, circulated, and passed from one person to another.

That gesture makes “Lecturas Posibles” particularly significant as part of The Bass’s expanding campus. The museum received The Rotunda from the City of Miami Beach in 2025, positioning the structure as both an entry point into Collins Park and a new site for artistic experimentation. Pica’s installation does not simply occupy the architecture; it activates its past, returning the former gathering space to public use through an artwork built around participation.

For Amalia Pica, Communication Has Always Been a Collective Act

Exhibition view of Amalia Pica, “Lecturas Posibles,” at The Bass, courtesy of the artist and The Bass.

Over the past three decades, Pica has developed a practice that examines both the possibilities and failures of communication. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and video, she frequently turns to ordinary materials and familiar social situations to explore the ways people speak, listen, learn, misunderstand, and construct meaning together.

Her interest in educational environments is especially important to “Lecturas Posibles.” Before establishing herself as an artist, Pica trained and worked as a primary school teacher, an experience that has continued to inform her attention to classrooms and other spaces where knowledge is produced and negotiated. In her work, these environments are never entirely neutral. They are places where language can be learned, but also regulated; where authority can be reinforced, but also questioned.

That tension runs throughout the new installation. To write in a library—to mark a book or draw across a surface typically associated with preservation and order—becomes, in Pica’s hands, a small act of transgression. The quiet discipline traditionally associated with the library gives way to visual noise: overlapping handwriting, drawings, revisions, and interruptions.

The installation also reflects Pica’s longstanding interest in how systems shape communication. “Lecturas Posibles” draws on literary ideas associated with Jorge Luis Borges, whose writing often moved between knowledge and fiction, order and absurdity. The library becomes not a fixed archive of authoritative information, but a place where stories remain unstable and open to revision.

Perhaps most importantly, Pica relinquishes control over what the work will become. Chalk can be erased. Marks will accumulate and disappear. The installation will continually shift over the course of its presentation, resisting the idea of the artwork as a fixed and permanent object.

Why “Lecturas Posibles” Feels Especially Urgent Now

Amalia Pica, “Aula grande (outlined,”) 2024, Found objects, plaster, chalkboard paint, oil stick, chalk, 100 1/2 x 222 x 444 inches; 255.3 x 563.9 x 1127.8 cm, Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

There is something particularly timely about an installation that asks audiences to slow down, participate, and make meaning together.

At a moment when so much of our communication is mediated through screens, algorithms, and increasingly polarized systems of exchange, Pica creates a physical environment in which meaning cannot simply be delivered from one source to a passive audience. It has to be made collectively. Visitors are positioned as both readers and authors, contributors to a work that will remain incomplete without them.

The choice of chalk is central to that idea. Unlike the permanent gestures often associated with public writing, chalk foregrounds impermanence. A mark can be added, changed, covered over, or erased altogether. The resulting installation becomes a visible record of negotiation: many voices occupying the same space, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in contradiction.

That process also mirrors the experience of learning itself. Knowledge is not static. It is revised through experience, exchange, disagreement, and repetition. As visitors layer their own contributions onto Pica’s carefully constructed environment, the installation moves from blankness toward complexity, shaped by the unpredictable presence of its audience.

For The Bass, “Lecturas Posibles” offers an especially meaningful way to inaugurate this next chapter for The Rotunda. The installation reconnects the architecture to its history as a civic gathering place while asking what such a space can mean now. It is a library, but not one organized around silence. It is an artwork, but not one that remains untouched. And it is a space for reading, only here reading becomes an active, communal process—one in which every visitor has the opportunity to write something back.