Undress for The Met
It has been 30 years since the launch of The Guerrilla Girls' infamous poster, Do Women have to be Naked to get into The Met. With this in mind, I began to question if The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection has progressed. Is there still a subjective representation of women in their collection? In a two-part project, I explored this topic by creating an interactive desktop-based data visualization and an infographic word map.
RESEARCH & DATA
The dataset used for this project was provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Utilizing their open access dataset, which has over 500,000 images from the museum’s collection, I worked with the CSV file. To analyze acquisition date and artist gender, I manually added this data into the CSV file.
FIRST OUTPUT
The desktop-based visualization was developed in partnership with Parsons School of Design. In both quantitative and qualitative ways, I visualized the proportion of female nudes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (The Met) entire collection. I also visualized acquisitions over time by female artists from The Modern and Contemporary collection. Tools utilized in this portion of the project were CSS, D3, Figma, HTML, and JavaScript. When presenting the data visualization to The Met’s digital department, it was noted that the topic of gender is integral to the discourse of the museum’s curatorial staff. This sparked my curiosity even more, how are they approaching this topic? Are there more artworks by female artists on display than of female nudes?
SECOUND OUTPUT
Expanding on this dataset and topic, I created an infographic word-map of the artworks on display in May 2020. This infographic compared artworks of female nudes to artworks by female artists in The Modern and Contemporary Collection. Each graphical element was purposely chosen to create a visual taxonomy. Black represents artworks containing female nudes, while pink represents artworks by female artists. The size of the typography is reflective of the acquisition date. The typography is ordered vertically by the date the artwork was created and placed vertically in alphabetical order. Tools utilized in this portion of the project were Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
This infographic highlighted that The Met’s actions are true; there are more artworks by female artists on display, than artworks of nude women in The Modern and Contemporary Collection. While The Met’s curatorial staff is bringing this topic to the forefront, this is only one part of their collection and the representation of women in art is a systemic issue. I am grateful to have worked with The Met on the first part of the project and created these visualizations as a means to contribute to this topic.