Preservation
Social platforms can disappear, lock accounts, change moderation policies, bury work, or remove queer material with little warning. Durable websites help keep work and context reachable.
Almanac of Queer Visual Artists
AQVA is a living registry of queer artists and cultural workers. Queer culture moves like water, across borders, across generations, and across disciplines. This archive exists to document those tides and help people discover one another.
Encouraging artist-owned websites, durable archives, and discoverable queer creative work beyond algorithmic platforms.
Why AQVA exists
Queer creatives need continuity.
AQVA treats independent web presence as cultural infrastructure: a way to preserve context, return agency to artists, and make queer work findable without depending on a single platform.
Ownership
A personal website, archive, shop, or contact page can hold captions, statements, links, and records in a place the artist or project controls.
Discoverability
Registry records help visitors find artists, collaborators, publications, regions, mediums, themes, and respectful contact paths.
Independence
AQVA points people toward artist-owned spaces. It is not a feed, marketplace, ranking system, or replacement for the sites it documents.
Registry preview
Independent queer web presences
A selected view from 13 visible records, pointing outward to artist-owned sites, archives, shops, publications, and contact pages.
public record
Gaylord Cockland
Gaylord Cockland is a self-taught artist who specializes in the hyperrealistic depiction of male anatomy. At the heart of his work is the meticulously detailed pencil drawing, through which he explores the infinite di...
Open record
public record
Kami D.
Born and raised in Germany, Kami now lives in Seattle where he is working as a freelance illustrator and comic artist. Developing his vision of "Old Man Yaoi", a reclamation of a derided genre by taking everything t...
Open record
public record
Cody Van Winkle
Cody Van Winkle is a curious experimenter, surely a jack of all trades and master of none. Very self-taught, he works in any media he can get his hands on, often mixing them together. He typically works with figures a...
Open record
public record
Dano
Dano creates vivid, unapologetic portraits of queer bodies—primarily nudes—using bold watercolor and digital media as tools for healing, reclamation, and self-expression. Through negative space and evolving brushwork,...
Open recordWeb Resources
Build an independent presence
Practical guides for artists, projects, and institutions maintaining durable work outside mainstream platforms.
Domains
Choosing and maintaining a public address that can move with an artist's practice.
Building a Website
A practical outline for a small artist site with a name, work, context, and contact path.
Preservation
Habits for keeping files, captions, sites, publications, and context reachable over time.
Publishing
Ways to begin with one page, a template, a document, or shared infrastructure.