''It's a freak show, an absolute freak show!'' Helen Kohen chuckles. That's the false portrait of the Miami art scene found in the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, where Kohen has been sifting through almost six decades of locally produced television shows. Miami's TV stations ``weren't interested in the visual arts unless it had an absurd hook. For three Halloweens in a row, [then-CBS affiliate] WTVJ visited the home of a man who placed huge, grotesque sculptures on his front lawn. Why? Not because he was an accomplished artist. But because he claimed to be a warlock!''

With a sigh, Kohen continues, ``Miami has always had some of the finest artists of any place, but they've never gotten coverage on TV. The audience there never got the whole picture -- we have to fill it in.''

To that end, Kohen is kicking off this year's edition of the Wolfson Archives' Rewind/ Fast-Forward Film Festival on Thursday with a presentation on Miami's hidden art history -- sans warlocks such as the aforementioned Lewis VanDercar. To annotate the cringe-worthy array of vintage television clips she has unearthed, she'll draw on her experience as The Miami Herald's art critic from 1978 to her 1995 retirement, as well as her current consulting efforts for the Miami-Dade County Library's Vasari Project, an archive chronicling area art since 1945.

The program won't be a complete visual train wreck, though. Kohen has found a few bright spots amid the historical ''butchering,'' including sharp programming from PBS station WPBT. And WTVJ partially managed to redeem itself with segments on Robert Rauschenberg's 1979 trip to Miami to design the cover of The Miami Herald's now-defunct Tropic magazine, as well as Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1983 Surrounded Islands, for which the duo encircled 11 Biscayne Bay islands with 6.5 million square feet of hot-pink polypropylene.

Also to be screened: 1967 footage of University of Miami art students demonstrating over their work's being ignored by the curators at their school's Lowe Art Gallery (''Local has always been a four-letter word in Miami,'' Kohen quips); a 1981 look at the eerily lifelike sculptures of Duane Hanson; a 1985 chat with draftsman Pablo Cano, and a 1973 profile of Purvis Young, whose paintings then adorned the outside walls of abandoned buildings along Overtown's Goodbread Alley. The WTVJ interviewer's tone may be risible (meet ``the Van Gogh of the ghetto''), but the early snapshot of Young is fascinating.

But the point of Kohen's presentation isn't just to wander down memory lane. It's also to remind the community that a rich art scene took root long before Art Basel Miami Beach established Miami's international reputation as the most vital U.S. art burg outside of New York and Los Angeles.

AFTER THE BOATLIFT

Ironically, for all their obsessive image-consciousness, our august city fathers didn't set Miami down its path towards art stardom. Rather, more recent Cuban-exile arrivals, particularly in the wake of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, first nudged Miami onto the international stage.

''They came from a culture that thought it was OK to have a son who was an artist,'' Kohen explains. ``In a Cuban family, if you had artistic talent, you were encouraged to pursue it. In an American family, if you had artistic talent, you were encouraged to become an orthopedist. That [Cuban] community got behind its own very early on.''

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