Margarita Cano's domain was once the public library, and within its walls, she made Miami art history. These days, the retired librarian and arts administrator creates her own works of art -- magical naive scenery inspired by memory and longing -- in the storybook surroundings of her Little Havana home.

Flanked by blooming flame trees on a corner of Beacon Boulevard, the house is a historic Spanish Deco jewel from the 1930s, its interior a serried mass of antiques, Cuban art, and African and Latin American artifacts.

''It doesn't get more Baroque than this,'' Cano says.

Then there's The Chair -- ''Gothic Revival Americana from the 1860s'' -- bought at a local antique store. Cano, 77, sits all her guests there in the subtle window light and photographs them, chronicling through the years a veritable Who's Who of the early Miami art scene (and some riveting Cuban personalities whose names and faces she'd rather keep private).

Cano was a newly exiled Cuban librarian, the wife of musician Pablo Cano and the young mother of two toddlers when she arrived in South Florida in 1962 and went to work in the bayside library for what became the Miami-Dade Public Library System. She would stay 29 years.

Across the decades she launched and developed the system's art collection, establishing an arts-exhibition program that focused on the early work of emerging Cuban Americans and African-American artists such as Overtown's Purvis Young. The collection now consists of some 2,000 pieces, mostly works on paper, and is considered the most comprehensive public holding of artwork by Miami artists.

''She was it. She brought that idea -- the concept of having art in the library -- with her,'' says Helen Kohen, a former Miami Herald art critic and Cano's friend. ``She had the eye to show the best and to give art a chance in this town.''

In 1983, while she was a board member of the Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, Cano organized the pivotal exhibition The Miami Generation: Nine Cuban American Artists, which traveled to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, bringing national attention to made-in-Miami art. She also became a member of the Cintas Foundation board and has helped for decades administer its prestigious arts awards.

''Short, sweet, wicked and glamorous,'' Cintas board member Manuel González roasted Cano as he presented her with the foundation's lifetime service award at a recent ceremony at Florida International University's Frost Art Museum.

Says Cano: ``I simply loved art and had all these ideas and all this energy I wanted to put to work.''

Cano collaborated with Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padrón and Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan to launch Miami Book Fair International when it began in 1984 as Books by the Bay. And she worked with Jan van der Marck, founding director of the Center for the Fine Arts, precursor to the Miami Art Museum.

In the 1970s and '80s, Cano organized key exhibitions at the library that brought to the forefront local artists at the same time she staged exhibitions that tapped into national art trends like print-making, silk-screening, geometric abstraction and quilting. She hit on the idea of an Artmobile as an outreach initiative to diverse communities.

''Working with her was wonderful,'' says Barbara Young, a retired librarian who in 1976 became the Artmobile librarian and likens her conversations with Cano to ``a tennis match.''

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