ARCHIVAL ACTIVISM

WAAM | Artist as Archivist Residency Platform

By Isabella Marie Garcia |

Across archives, I am reminded of the strength of the personal and much more so when it comes into the public eye. Leafing through the archives of five artists based in Miami, I investigate what is at the heart of Women Artists Archive Miami’s (WAAM) Artist as Archivist (A/A) program—contextualized in two words—as archival activism. It is a term that defines how these artists use social justice in their respective practices and how their archives serve as testaments to the past, present, and future of the work executed by Aurora Molina, Fereshteh Toosi, Chire Regans,  Johanne Rahman, and  Zonia Zena.

Aurora Molina’s The City Beautiful is Turning Ugly speaks on the city of Coral Gables as a site of reconstruction as Molina responds to the bulldozing of WWII buildings into luxury condos and the eviction of current residents through fiber-applied photographs. The works featured in THE CITY I LIVE IN DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE, a 2023 exhibition at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Coconut Grove, portray the urban facelifts being enacted on the city the artist calls home as of twenty-two years through sewn-in thread onto printed images that emphasize architecture façades, graffiti on construction zone pop-ups, and signs that demarcate caution and danger to those who dare to enter these zones of redevelopment. 

Coral Gables is no stranger to being a city whose history is muddled in proper attribution. Often credited solely to the genius of its founder George Merrick, the coral bedrock and beginnings of the city are indebted to the labor and masonry of Bahamian immigrants in South Florida. As Molina bears witness to a new wave of infrastructure change occuring within the neighborhood, The City Beautiful is Turning Ugly comments on the dark pattern that appears like a vicious cycle in Miami’s urban growth—an unwarranted move by developers to remove neighborhood character and a failure to respect what the communities before you have built.

Titled Mansions of Rastafari, Johanne Rahman’s film and digital portraiture work documents Rastafari practitioners living in Miami. Assigned to different denominations based on shared beliefs and core thinking, Rahman’s portraits demonstrate the everyday lived existence of Rastafarians in placing them within the context of their homes and third spaces. Rather than boxing them into exterior appearance, the portraits signify how these practitioners and the greater Rastafarian movement were born in the Caribbean but now extend outwards into nuanced landscapes, such as that of Miami. 

Ranging from 2015 to 2023, the more than thirty portraits taken for Mansions of Rastafari showcase individuals on their own and in arm’s embrace with community members across the city. From Richmond Heights to North Miami, the Rastafari community are rendered through Rahman’s lens as alive with grace. Their facial expressions range in everything from mid-speak to joyful, and as they bear markers of their Rastafarian beliefs through headwraps, turbans, and personalized outfits, they are humanized as simply being. 

Braiding together the importance of interpersonal relationships between Black women and hair adornment as integral to her sculpture work, Chire Regans aka VantaBlack’s Rewoven encapsulates the value of the connections and conversations the artist has with women across Miami-Dade County and those with hometown roots out of the state. Working on the series while in residence at Locust Projects, Regans translates these interactions into braided sculptures that utilize hair found in beauty bodegas and supply stores for Black women as woven together with fabric and accessories that are repped with pride by Black women and girls. 

Encircled in tight-knit spirals that become the foundation of the sculptures, the talismans of dreadlock beads and braid cuffs adjacent to gold and silver door knockers in the shape of hearts, hoops, and stars are affixed and hang off the works as portraits of Regans’ relationship with each individual woman. How they contribute their individual skills and selves as community members are akin to the African fabrics interspersed throughout the Rewoven series. They are the very veins of how a human ecosystem lives and breathes, and in honoring their presence in these braided sculptures, Regans advocates for the symbiosis of how these women fuel her purpose as an artist and educator.

Fereshteh Toosi’s Solar Salutations serves as an oral history to the anxiety and emotions surrounding South Florida’s environmental climate. Taking place as a triage of workshops, Toosi organized a cohort of experiences that centered on how those living in the region contemplate the natural world and what’s at stake with carbon footprints, stewardship towards land, and accountability to how one’s actions impact neighboring ecologies. From a ferry ride to Pelican Island in Biscayne Bay to a sleepover in A.D. Barnes Park, Toosi maximizes immersive experiences as rich in output by uniting strangers together and interviewing their perspectives on being present in these biospheres. 

Recorded at the sites of these immersions, Solar Salutations brings agency to the voices of those living in immediate proximity to South Florida’s climate realities. Ephemeral in its execution, the recordings and audio files bring up questions about the future of this part of the world as inhabitable in the foreseeable future. As climate gentrification compels developers to break ground and displace residents in Liberty City, Brownsville, and Little Haiti, there’s the added layer of generational consequence that is at stake. There is often not a definitive answer to these concerns, but across Toosi’s organic coming-togethers, the opportunity to share and lament is afforded through their facilitation. 

Mirroring a stroll across suburban streets, Zonia Zena’s Along Little Santo Domingo is a lens-based ode to the community that is increasingly endangered in disappearing as signaled by its placement on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2023. Situated in the heart of Allapattah, Zena’s contemporary colorful captures of Little Santo Domingo are juxtaposed with black and white images combed from city archives of the neighborhood. There is the persistent ebb and flow of what was and what is across the lineage of photographs, and how they serve as preservation of what may be no longer there in the coming years.

Dolphin and plain mailboxes bear the address numbers and surnames of those living within the homes protected by ornate iron gates. There is beauty in the details of a scorpion neck tattoo, two star hoop earrings sitting next to each other on a lobe, in the bed of a truck that is toppling over with a pile of bicycles, in the rooster running across the pavement. There is a stillness and simultaneous momentum across the photographs. Zena’s mastery lies in presenting what gets overlooked in the everyday of Miami’s hustle and bustle: that the mundane and ordinary is divine and worth protecting.

The five archives embedded in the A/A program are guided by the desire to document their immediate communities and simultaneously challenge the issues afflicting them, from climate displacement to rapid urban development to cultural erasure within the framework of Miami. Commissioned through the program financially to realize their work, Artist as Archivist also gives these artists what is now a luxury in the city: a dedicated home where the product of their artistic labor can live and be accessed by anyone interested in learning more about their research.

Women Artists Archive Miami (WAAM)’s Artist as Archivist Residency is funded by Knight Foundation’s 2021 Arts Challenge Grant.