![Neighbors' Ledger (El Libro de Vecinos)](/artworks/Rafael "Rafa" Sola_Neighbors' Ledger (El Libro de Vecinos).jpg)
Inspiration Source
Brickell Homeowners Association Welcomes Court Decision Setting Aside City Approvals and Affirming Community Participation in Historic-Preservation Proceedings at First Miami Presbyterian
This news release centers on a court ruling that strengthens **community-led preservation** of historic urban fabric in Miami.[48] The Brickell Homeowners Association and nearby residents challenged the City of Miami’s earlier approvals that would have removed historic protections from a school buil... Full context
This news release centers on a court ruling that strengthens **community-led preservation** of historic urban fabric in Miami.[48] The Brickell Homeowners Association and nearby residents challenged the City of Miami’s earlier approvals that would have removed historic protections from a school building and parking lot associated with First Miami Presbyterian Church, clearing the way for demolition.[48] The appellate court unanimously quashed those approvals, finding that the city had improperly excluded neighboring property owners from the preservation proceedings and violated procedural due process.[48] Under city code, qualifying nearby residents have the right to present evidence, question witnesses and argue on the record when historic protections are at stake.[48] The ruling sends the case back to the city and affirms that decisions about altering or erasing historic structures must be made in a fully public, participatory process, not only between developers and officials. As such, the article illustrates how community organizing and legal action can become tools of preservation, ensuring that neighborhoods can defend their architectural heritage and the collective memories embedded in long‑standing buildings against unilateral redevelopment pressures.[48]
Neighbors' Ledger (El Libro de Vecinos)
Neighbors' Ledger (El Libro de Vecinos) documents a legal victory that affirmed the power of collective voice. The work is a layered ledger: reclaimed storefront planks carry decoupaged court transcripts, hand-lettered excerpts, and stenciled maps of a school and parking lot once threatened with erasure. A pale church silhouette rises from a rusted parking-grid motif, while gold-leaf accents pick out dates and the court seal — small, literal flashes of officialdom against the patina of everyday life. The bottom rail lists qualifying nearby residents in bold hand-painted capitals, a roll-call that insists these names be seen and heard.
Made with neighbors in weekend workshops at La Lonja Workshop and Muelle 7 Kiosk Studio, the piece was painted with enamel mixed on Amira’s board and finished with the harbor-weathered techniques I learned on the street. Neighbors' Ledger is both archive and altar: it preserves fragile court pages under varnish, honors community testimony through hand-lettering, and stages a public bench so viewers can sit, read, remember, and talk. By foregrounding community-led preservation and the principle of procedural due process, the work makes visible how neighborhoods can defend their architectural heritage and collective memories against unilateral redevelopment.
About the Artist
Rafael "Rafa" Sola
Rafael Sola (he/him) is a sign painter, muralist, and social-practice artist born and raised in a port-side neighborhood where colonial storefronts, neon markets, and improvised shelters coexist. He i...
View Full Profile →Critic Reviews
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Dr. Helena Voss
Art historian specializing in formal analysis, trained at the Courtauld Institute. Focuses on visual structure over narrative.
As a formal exercise in civic memory, Neighbors' Ledger (El Libro de Vecinos) operates with a clarity of structure that feels both modernist and vernacular. Rafa Sola arranges reclaimed planks into a strict vertical panel grid, and within that gird he stages a delicate competition between text, pictorial silhouette, and weathered field. The church steeple, painted in a flattened cream, asserts itself as a central, almost emblematic form, while the rusted parking-grid behind it recedes as pattern rather than literal place. This is composition as argument, a declarative geometry that turns legal process into an architectural plane of seeing and reading.
Color and surface are the work's true rhetoric. A limited palette of teal patina, oxide rust, and muted gold creates a residency of time on the boards, as if the object has been in the public square for years. Gold leaf punctuates dates and the court seal, small reflective notes of authorization against matte enamel and varnished paper. The hand-lettered roll call at the bottom functions as both typographic baseline and democratic gesture, its bold capitals pulling the eye horizontally across the panel and anchoring the viewer in community rather than institution. Technique is literal testimony here, decoupaged transcripts under varnish serve as archival strata, and stenciled maps read like faint cartographies of what was nearly erased.
I judge this work by its ability to reconcile craft and politics through formal means, and on that criterion it largely succeeds. The collaborative production, the weekend workshops, and the sitefulness of the materials give the piece an ethical seriousness that matches its visual economy. My only reservation concerns legibility versus abstraction, sometimes the weathering strategies obscure specific testimony in favor of texture. Even so, Neighbors' Ledger is a durable, disciplined public altar, a piece whose measured formal language amplifies the very procedural due process it celebrates.
Composition and grid Color palette and patina Hand-lettering and typography Material techniques and varnished archive Community collaboration Political and archival functionAug 16, 2026