Introduction: Building the Archive

In 2021, SWAP and the Hamilton Public Library signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the HPL to take on and catalogue SWAP’s physical collection of around 500 books.

Jelena Vermilion, the executive director of Sex Workers' Action Program (SWAP) Hamilton, began gathering materials by, for, and about sex workers in 2020. This collection has since grown into the Jelena Vermilion Collection, digitally housed at the Hamilton Public Library and the ArQuives, and is now one of the largest sex work media archive collections in history.

Honoring the destigmatizing and protective capacities of archival work, this digital exhibition showcases Vermilion’s sex work activism, artmaking, and community building as well as the decades of activism which laid the groundwork for SWAP Hamilton. The exhibit features the history and work by SWAP Hamilton, their media library archive, events and a commissioned Sex Worker Portrait Series.