Women Artists Archive + Media (WAAM) is a nonprofit community informed digital archive started by Anita Sharma. WAAM envisions an art world where the legacies of women and gender-expansive artists from all backgrounds are visible, celebrated, and prioritized. Rooted in decolonial principles, WAAM is a Miami-based nomadic archival platform dedicated to preserving, documenting and bringing these histories to the forefront.
Through collaborative archival practices, digitization, oral histories, and public access initiatives, WAAM safeguards cultural histories that might otherwise be lost while creating new pathways for community engagement.
What We Do
WAAM began in 2017 as a research project to understand how a community archive can serve women artists in documenting their creative legacies in truly accessible and equitable ways.
WAAM documents and preserves artists' archives by organizing physical exhibitions, digitizing artists' studio archives, and crowdsourcing collections.
The project is a response to a growing need to build a collaborative archival presence in Miami to record the artistic production that has occurred here since the 1970s and beyond.
We believe in the importance of repositioning archives that have traditionally operated as sites of privilege, to record the creative contributions of communities left out of the historical record.