The dataset I pulled from the MoMA GitHub was the artists dataset as opposed to the artworks dataset. Consequently when looking at dates I was focused on when artists were born, as opposed to when artworks were exhibited. Initially I'd planned on joining the two datasets together so that I could contextualise the artists/exhibits within specific art movements, but exploring the artists dataset itself proved interesting enough on its own.
Just for a bit of context I added my favourite artists, Kandinsky, Klee and Rothko, who were all born a lot earlier than the majority of MoMA exhibiting artists.
My first thought here was that much would be affected by movement and medium. In other words there weren't many video artists born in the early 19th century. There probably weren't many Cubists born in the 1970s either. What did the concentration of artists born in the 1930s and 1940s tell us? Who were these artists, what type of art did they make and in what medium? This was the point to note that the extremities of colour map reflect both art history and the museum's curatorial decisions.
I then wanted to break this down by nationality. As the vast majority of artists in the database are American looking at American artists only would look very similar to the first visualisation. So I looked at the other nationalities only.
There is quite a bit of variation here. There were many German and British artists born post 1960. Why was that? In contrast, most artists born in the mid 19th century were French.
Just as most artists were American, most were also male. So it was interesting to see what pattern emerged when comparing male and female artists. Not only the raw numbers of MoMA exhibiting artists, but also the most influential male and female modern artists, at least the ones I could think of (supplemented by a bit of research!).
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