The Associated Women in the Arts was founded in 1980 and is a professional art organization comprised of women in Southern Louisiana who specialize in a variety of visual art forms. Their organization was created to advance the causes of women artists through networking and marketing and to help create opportunities for discussion of their work, continuing studies in workshops with national artists and opportunities for exhibitions of their work. The artists in AWA enjoy a variety of mediums including but not limited to oil painting, pastel, watercolor, mixed media, colored pencil, acrylic, and collage and their work spans art forms of realism, impressionistic, non objective, expressionism and abstract.