Project #10 HIDDEN ART

Project Description

I love visiting art museums and always go to museums whenever I travel to a new place. I think artwork shown in museums can best represent the value of certain history and culture. Especially famous museums such as MOMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art, they hold a large amount of art, and because of having higher diversity and amount of visitors, to some degree they control what kinds and trend of art could be shown to the public.

By chance I have read about articles that critique museums which intentionally design the way artwork shown and selectively exhibit only partial storage. For example, art museums used to have very few female artist, but nearly 85% of the nudes in museum are female. It is interesting to see how artwork displayed in museum exposed certain social problems. Lately, I found this article about hidden artwork in museum which talks about how large portion of art in the museum storage is hidden from public. It raises the question of "What are museums for, and whom are they supposed to benefit?"

Groskopf, C. (n.d.). Museums are keeping a ton of the world's most famous art locked away in storage. Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https://qz.com/583354/why-is-so-much-of-the-worlds-great-art-in-storage/

For this project, I am going to use the data provided by Metropolitan Museum of Art and visualize the comparison of the amount of artwork on display and not on display that from selected famous artists. Also allow user to generate random artwork that is either on or not on display, and when the artwork is not on display there will be visuals created to let the user know that they just find an artwork that they are not able to see in the museum.

Design Process

Storyboard

After I know what I want to do I went to the Met museum site and find the API instructions. For visualizing the comparison of artworks on and not on display, I choose to use "search" request for the API, which I am able to insert the name of selected artists and get the data of the amount of his/her/their work that on display and not on display. And I decided to use circles to represent the total amount of work and the hole in the middle is the work that on display. Other than the visualization, I also use the object id request to let user random request any object in the museum storage, and the detail information of specific artwork will be shown for the user. In the json file, information of whether on display or not is boolean, so when it equal to false there will be an dot created and shining in the background.

Reflection

I think my project lets any artwork get equal chance for people to learn about, not just being guided by the museum. I want to apply the second principle of challenge data in the data feminism principles. To visualize the fact that there is a portion of hidden artwork that is not shown to anyone anytime, and raise the question of who decides what artworks are shown in museum.