Exploring public art data on Wikidata
Edward Elgar by Jemma Pearson
Wikidata is a source of lots of interesting data.
One area I’m quite interested in is data about public art.
I try to ensure the Wikipedia page on public art in Herefordshire is kept up to date and I’ve tried to ensure that all of the public art recorded there is also available on Wikidata.
From Wikidata you can access the data in useful ways.
You can view all of the public art data I used for this post as a table. The data is patchy because it’s compiled by volunteers (like me) and needs to be referenced. So no reference (or no research), no data.
What can we learn from this dataset?
1. Public art saw a 21st century explosion in Herefordshire
Have a look at this timeline:
George Cornewall Lewis by Carlo Marochetti
So the first piece of art pops up in 1864.
It’s George Cornewall Lewis. Better known to Herefordians as the chap in front of the Shire Hall.
Then nothing more until the Franklin Barnes sunflowers 100 years later.
Then a gap until the year 2000 and since then we’ve been adding artworks at the rate of 1.8 a year.
Though 18 entries don’t have a creation date and I’m pretty sure that several of those at least date from the 80s and 90s. If anyone has a reference for any of those, please let me know.
2. The majority of public art works were created by men
(Where we know the sex of the artist)
21 public art works were created by artists known to be men and 5 by artists known to be women.
For the remaining 23 works we either don’t know who the artist was or don’t know what sex they were.
3. Walenty Pytel is very popular in Herefordshire
Walenty Pytel is known to be the artist of 9 public art works in Herefordshire.
No other artist comes close. Bruce Williams created 3 works though these are all part of the same commission (The Rotherwas Women).
Jemma Pearson has created 2 works and 13 other artists have each created one work a piece.
For 22 artworks we don’t know the artist.
4. Animals are the most popular subject
Salmon in Ross by Walenty Pytel
11 artworks depict animals, 9 depict people, 4 depict activities, 3 depict physical places and 3 more plants.
For the remainder we don’t have a description of what they depict.
5. Public art is concentrated in Hereford and some of the market towns
Just have a look:
Let me know if you can plug any gaps. Or better still just go and add the data… it is a wiki after all.