Movement of Tate gallery artists. This visualization shows the country of their birth and death, sorted by regions/continents.
This timeline lists some artists who were born in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Africa and Oceania from 1900 to 1929, and passed away in the United Kingdom.
This project presents Tate gallery artists who are born between 1900 and 1929. A visualization of their birth and death place is created to outline the artist's movements. A very small proportion of the artists were born in Asia, Latin America the Caribbean (LAC), Africa, and Oceania. A timeline focusing on those foreign artists is created to introduce their work and biography.
This project was based on a dataset from the Tate gallery in England, which includes artists of this gallery born between 1900 and 1929. The dataset contains the date and location of the artist's birth and death and a link to their profile on the Tate gallery website. The profile on the website includes their works and a more detailed biography.
The dataset was cleaned with Open Refine where entries with incomplete fields of birthplace or death place were removed. The place field in the original dataset contains both city and country, which were now separated using regular expressions.
The places were sorted and categorized by continents/ regions: North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America the Caribbean (LAC), Africa, and Oceania. This was manually processed because the countries are coded in the native language (e.g. Zhonghua corresponds to China, and Nihon corresponds to Japan). Adding another column makes it easier to see the general trend. Also, I am more interested in artists from the last four regions because there were just less communication and travel between those regions to the Western world.
As for the timeline, photos of artwork and biography texts were downloaded from the Tate website. This would allow the audience to learn about the artists in greater depth.
The first visualization used Flourish to create Alluvial diagrams. The flow from one end to the other intuitively symbolizes the artists' movements from one place to the other. Instead of cities, countries were used as the variables on both sides to make the flowchart more concise and easier to follow (since many people might not know where each city is)
The diagram is also interactive. Hovering over the flows will show the number of artists moving between the two specific countries. The size of the flow is in proportion to the number, thus people could see how few of the artists were from non-Western regions. There is also a control bar on the top so people could zoom into the desired continents/ regions.
Using timeline.js, a timeline focusing on artists who are born outside Europe and North America but died in the UK is also shown below. I am very curious about those artists who traveled to a foreign land and how that experience might impact their artworks. The audience would be able to view those artists and their works in detail in the sorted timeline.
The Alluvial diagram shows that there were numerous movements of Tate gallery artists across countries, especially within Europe. There are also some movements between North America and Europe. A very small proportion of the artists were born in Asia, Latin America the Caribbean (LAC), Africa, and Oceania. The timeline allows the audience to see the distinct styles of their artworks, which might be due to their foreign backgrounds and experiences.
One drawback of the visualizations is that it only describes the birth and death places, so any travel or abroad experiences during their lifetime are not included. Moreover, the dataset could be biased since it's from a gallery based in the United Kindom. However, this approach still provides a lot of insight into the artists' movement. I could envision the same approach being applied to other datasets analyzing other populations and helping the general public envision those movements across regions.