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 independent presence matters
Social platforms can disappear, lock accounts, change moderation policies, bury work, or remove queer material with little warning. When a queer artist's presence exists only inside those systems, our history and legacy become fragmented and fragile.
A personal website, archive, shop, or contact page can hold captions, links, statements, and records in a place the artist controls. This registry exists to help people find those spaces, not replace them.
Discoverability
Registered artists, galleries, muses, and collaborators are searchable by name, role, medium, region, themes, and respectful contact openness.
Persistence
The registry favors durable website and portfolio links, contact pages, shops, archives, and artist-run publishing over third-party apps.
Trust
Participation in the registry is reviewed against plain-language standards around authorship, consent, collaboration, and privacy.
The registry is deliberately simple: public-facing artist records with search, filters, and outward links. No accounts, comments, likes, direct messages, payments, or feed mechanics.
This is currently a prototype. Early participation is invite/review-based while the underlying system, language and standards are tested with a small group.