Women’s Art Week
2025-Present
Founder + Curator
Women’s Art Week Palm Beach or WAW is an annual, countywide cultural initiative founded and curated by Gaby Viteri to increase the visibility, representation, and participation of women in the arts.
Grounded at the intersection of curation, community, and placemaking, WAW expands the exhibition beyond a single gallery or institution, activating cultural spaces throughout Palm Beach County with free programming that includes exhibitions, artist conversations, performances, workshops, and collective experiences. The project brings artists, cultural organizations, independent spaces, and audiences into conversation while creating new opportunities for women to make, exhibit, build relationships and engage with art.
At its core, Women’s Art Week considers visibility as both a curatorial and civic act: who is given space, whose work becomes part of the cultural record, and how community can participate in shaping that record.
A THREE-YEAR CURATORIAL ARC
The first three editions of WAW were created as an evolving trilogy exploring the experience of women through three interconnected ideas: Parallels, Reclamation, and Integration.
2025 — PARALLELS
Parallels examined the simultaneous and often divergent roles, identities, expectations, and creative lives inhabited by women.
The inaugural Women’s Art Week established a framework for bringing women artists and audiences together across Palm Beach County while creating space for artistic exchange, visibility, and community. Its programming included exhibitions and cultural experiences developed in collaboration with artists and local creative spaces.
2026 — RECLAMATION
Reclamation expanded the project both geographically and conceptually, asking what it means to reclaim what has been lost, abandoned, suppressed, or left behind.
Across exhibitions, ceramics, performance, music, workshops, conversation, and participatory experiences, artists approached reclamation through material, identity, creativity, spirituality, place, and personal history.
Rather than prescribing a singular interpretation of the theme, the curatorial framework allowed each artist and partner to locate reclamation within their own practice. The result was a decentralized cultural experience unfolding across South Florida with one in which individual artistic inquiry became part of a larger collective conversation.
2027 — INTEGRATION
Integration completes the three-year curatorial arc.
Following Parallels, which considered the multiple realities women inhabit, and Reclamation, which explored the act of taking back what has been lost or relinquished, Integration asks what happens when those experiences are no longer held separately.
The final chapter considers integration as an active process: bringing together identity, history, creativity, contradiction, and change without requiring any part of the self to disappear.
ART + COMMUNITY + PLACE
Women’s Art Week was created around the belief that cultural participation does not need to happen within a single institution.
By working across galleries, studios, museums, churches, public spaces, cultural organizations, and unexpected venues, the project uses placemaking as a curatorial tool. Each site introduces a different audience and context for encountering art, allowing the geography of Palm Beach County itself to become part of the experience.
Community is not positioned simply as the audience for Women’s Art Week, but as one of its materials. Artists, organizations, musicians, educators, cultural leaders, and viewers collectively shape the project through participation and exchange.
AN EVOLVING CULTURAL RECORD
WAW functions simultaneously as a curatorial platform, community gathering, and documentation of women’s creative work within South Florida.
Across each edition, the project creates opportunities for artists to be seen, for audiences to encounter work outside familiar contexts, and for new relationships to form between artists, organizations, and the communities they inhabit.
What began as an effort to create greater visibility for women artists continues to evolve into a larger inquiry into how culture is created locally—and who is invited to participate in creating it.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
Women’s Art Week is an initiative of First Female. Explore the complete archive of exhibitions, artists, programming, partners, and upcoming events at First Female Palm Beach.