How to increase diversity among the artists that museums display has been an ongoing discussion for several years. It has been led by studies such as this one, that reveal an astonishing 85% of artists whose work are in major U.S museums, are white and 87% are male. Although other sources show that there has been an effort to lessen this difference, there seems to still be lots of work to do.
This led me to wonder how the diversity of artists in museums around the world is. The Tate Museum is one of the largest art galleries in the United Kingdom. Looking at a subset of their collection, I created a graph that illustrates the geographic origins of artists featured in the gallery.
A dataset including information on 700 artists born between 1920-1939 was used as the primary source for my project. The process of making the graph occurred in several steps.
First, in Excel, I removed all the variables except for place and year of birth. Then, each place of birth entry was replaced with its corresponding continent (roughly 100 artists were removed during this process due to missing entries about birthplace). This was an important step because it allowed me to see trends in representation at a larger scale across 6 continents, as opposed to comparing 700 different towns and cities all at once. Finally, I calculated the running sum of artists born in each continent, each year. To transform this cleaned dataset into a presentable data visualization, it was uploaded into Flourish as a stacked area chart.
Check out the results below!
By converting the data into a visual figure, we gain many insights that would not have been noticeable from looking at the dataset in Excel. The teal area obviously jumps out at you first, meaning that European artists are the most displayed, followed by North Americans.
But the main things I want you to pay attention are the orange, purple, and green shaded areas. It looks like Asian artists are slightly more represented than South American or African artists at the Tate Museum. Asians and South Americans are very under represented compared to the number of white artists, but the difference between the number of white and African artists is even worse. Only 41 African artists born between 1920-1939 are featured in the gallery, compared to the 376 European, or 125 North American artists.
Although you could tell there were significantly more European places listed as the place of birth in the original dataset, it would have been difficult to make comparisons between any of the other entries. Data visualization made this possible, however, and we gained insight that of the non-white races, Africans are the least represented, followed by South Americans and Asians.
In addition to finding that 85% are white, this study also found that 87% are male. This brought me to my next project idea–what is the female and male ratio like at the Tate Museum?
Using the same original dataset as earlier, information on gender and birth year was extracted (all artists that were missing gender information were removed). Next, a running count of the total number of male vs female artists was calculated and, once again, that data was uploaded into Flourish as an area chart.
From this graph we can see that while there are still many many more male artists, there is an increase in female artists as the years pass. This means that the museum is making an effort to diversify its collection of artists. This graph lets us see the number of each gender at each year but it is hard to tell what the increasing trend looks like. Is it linear? Or random spikes here and there?
To answer this question, I made a final data visualization that graphs the ratio of female to male artists throughout the dataset.
I used the same cleaned dataset as the second graph, but divided the number of female artists by the sum of female and male artists per year. It is presented as a line chart using Flourish.
So, it looks like there was an initial spike in the number of female artists born between 1920 and 1922 and it has been increasing very slowly ever since.
Transforming the dataset into a data visualization revealed trends in the Tate Museum artist collection that can contribute to the larger discussion of diversity in museums. The first graph I made showed that South American, Asian, and especially African artists are extremely under represented. This result could have been guessed from just looking at the original dataset in Excel, but the graph form lets us see that there has been a slight increase in their numbers, indicating that Tate museum has worked on its diversity of artists born between 1920 and 1922. The second graph showed the disparity between the number of male and female artists, but more interestingly, there is an increasing trend in the number of female artists whose work are displayed in the art gallery. Lastly, the third graph took a closer look at this increasing trend. The ratio of female to male artists appear to increasing very slowly, following an initial spike in 1921.
Data visualization is a powerful tool that allows us to understand data much more easily, as well as present it more neatly. The original dataset, containing lots of information about 700 different artists, was overwhelming to look at and it would have been difficult to pick up on patterns within the data. But by using data visualization tools like Flourish, I was able to present sections of the dataset in graphs in which we can compare and see trends within the data.
