MAGGIE STEBER, LAKOTA SIOUX ELDER AND SPIRITUAL LEADER MARIE RANDALL PRAYS OVER ANCESTRAL LANDS ON PINE RIDGE LAKOTA SIOUX RESERVATION, SOUTH DAKOTA US, 2004 © MAGGIE STEBER. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Aldeide Delgado sees Miami as a border, a meeting place, a city for global minds and ideas to gather and exchange perspectives and criticisms. Thus, it is the perfect venue for an international congregation of scholars and thinkers—in Delgado’s case, the inaugural Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) Congress, a summit for women in photography that will gather photographers, historians and curators from over 15 different countries at the Pérez Art Museum Miami come November 18. Entitled Women, Photography, and Feminisms, the Congress is the first of its kind, a necessary trailblazing force for marginalized voices in the field.

Delgado founded nonprofit WOPHA with an aim to amplify the contributions of female, trans, queer and non-binary photographers and thinkers in modern and contemporary art. The ethos for the Congress began with Delgado’s Catalogue of Cuban Women Photographers, an online database dedicated to preserving the work of female photographers in Cuba. Conditioned by her experience living in Miami since 2016 and assuming a Latinx identity, she expanded the catalogue globally, resulting in WOPHA. She explains that though strides for female representation in art and photography have been made in the aftermath of movements like #MeToo, necessary work remains.

WOPHA will engage with other institutions across Miami, including the Arts Connection Foundation, Green Space Miami, Lucie Foundation, The Betsy Hotel and the Rubell Museum. The inclusion of various spaces throughout the city reflects Delgado’s hopes of cementing Miami as a crucial space for discourse and conversation and “positioning WOPHA in the international context.”

“Expanding the scope of the project is a result of me identifying with the political character of the city and noticing the importance of highlighting women’s work from not just the Caribbean, Latin America and South Florida, but worldwide in general,” the founder says, “and how through this concept of the border space, that can be made possible.”

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Article written by Liza Mullett.