“Tohu Bohu” oil painting by John Bailly.

It took a long time for Miami to stand center stage, literally, as a culturally important city. So long identified as a vacuous vacation land filled with beach bunnies and cocaine cowboys, the city’s transformation into a much more significant force seemed to finally be acknowledged when homegrown Richard Blanco read his poem at the 2012 Presidential Inaugural Address, becoming the first Hispanic, the first gay man, and indeed the first Miamian to be chosen for this honor.

Blanco has just come out with a new memoir, which takes us through his Cuban-Miami roots – and rootlessness. He has also had a long history with the local visual arts community, a topic that will be explored on Thursday with painter John Bailly at the Center for Visual Communication.

Poet Richard Blanco; photo: Joyce Tenneson.

This is, in fact, an introduction to a collaboration between the two, “Place of Mind,” that combines words and images in a dialogue about identity and place. Both artists straddle homelands, have complicated relationships with what is considered roots, as so much of Miami has. Are we in the end, as both poet and painter wonder, belonging to both everywhere and undeniably here?

The paintings by Bailly hanging in the Center bring Miami into a much larger historical continuum; there are references to ancient maps, of old Troy and Jerusalem, of the archeological digs of the first settlements in South Florida of the Tequesta Indians. They seem to say: Miami is really just the latest metropolis in a long line of cities that incorporate, whether they know it or not, the history of forever-migrating peoples. It is the ultimate new metropolis.

That follows hand-in-hand with Blanco’s poetic exploration of the complicated nature of sense of place and mind. A nice fit for a Miami place called the Center for Visual Communication.

Presidential Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco and painter John Bailly start a conversation about a “Place of Mind” at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30; Bailly’s painting exhibit “The City” runs through Nov. 14; at the Center for Visual Communication, 541 NW 27th St., Miami; www.visual.org.