Culture as Care: A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music

There are moments when engaging with culture feels like consumption—and moments when it feels like care. This project was born out of a desire to return to the latter. To slow down, pay attention, and spend time with queer women’s art in a way that honours both its creative power and its role in our collective well-being.

Why We’re Doing This: Culture as Care

At Visible Vibrant, we talk a lot about visibility—who gets to be seen, whose stories are centered, and what happens when creativity is treated as essential rather than optional. This project grew out of that same question, but approached gently, over time, and through culture.

This year, we’re moving through queer women’s music, film, and visual art at a human pace: one album, one film, and one artist each week. Not to master them. Not to “keep up.” Simply to sit with them.

In a world that rewards speed, productivity, and constant output, slowing down to engage with art is a quiet act of resistance. For queer women especially, cultural work has long been a place of survival, meaning-making, and care. Long before there were policies or platforms, there were songs, images, films, and stories that said: you are not alone.

This project is about returning to that truth.

Culture is not a side dish to wellness

Health and wellness are often framed narrowly—what we eat, how we move, how we manage stress. Those things matter. But so does what we take in emotionally, creatively, and politically. The media we consume shapes our nervous systems, our sense of belonging, and our capacity for joy.

Queer women’s art has always carried this dual role. It holds grief and pleasure at the same time. It documents harm without being consumed by it. It imagines futures while telling the truth about the present. Engaging with this work isn’t just culturally enriching—it’s regulating, affirming, and connective.

This series treats culture as part of a broader wellness ecosystem. One that includes rest, curiosity, reflection, and permission to feel.

Why queer women’s work, specifically

Queer women’s contributions to culture are everywhere, and still too often sidelined—flattened into genres, erased from canons, or framed as niche rather than foundational. At the same time, queer women have built deep, resilient creative lineages across music, film, and visual art, often with limited resources and enormous courage.

By focusing intentionally on queer women artists and storytellers, this project is both a celebration and a corrective. It’s an invitation to notice patterns, influences, and shared language across disciplines and decades. It’s also an acknowledgement that visibility doesn’t just happen—it’s built through attention.

How to engage with this project

There’s no right way to move through this series. You might listen to an album while cooking, watch a film weeks later, or simply scroll through an artist’s work and sit with what it stirs up. You might already know these works well, or be encountering them for the first time.

Each week is designed as a small, complete offering. No homework. No pressure to consume everything. Just a moment of intentional engagement.

Why this lives at Visible Vibrant

Visible Vibrant exists at the intersection of creativity, visibility, and care. This project reflects that ethos in practice. It centers queer women’s voices. It values slowness and depth over volume. And it treats creative engagement as something that nourishes—not something that must be justified.

We’re doing this because art has always helped us make sense of ourselves and each other. Because representation still matters. Because joy, defiance, grief, and beauty are all part of being well. And because visibility, when approached thoughtfully, can be a form of care.

We’re glad you’re here. Take what you need. Come back when you want.