As a group, we wanted to investigate women artists’ visibility within major institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. Our core objective throughout the AH Visualization Project was to explore how geography affects women’s access to exhibiting their artwork, with a focus on identifying potential geographic “hubs” where women artists have gravitated in the 20th and 21st centuries. We were particularly interested in whether there were regional patterns in where women artists created their work and where it was displayed, as well as how these factors impact visibility in the art world today. We believe that exploring these kinds of questions is important for understanding patterns of representation and possible inequalities within major institutions in 2025. Our project combined an acquired dataset from the MoMA with added metadata, which we transformed into a Flourish map visualization embedded into a Framer website to present our findings in an accessible and interactive format.

For our dataset development and metadata choices, we focused on MoMA’s public collection and exhibition data for several key reasons. The MoMA is a globally recognized institution, and its digital accessibility made it a practical choice for our research questions about the visibility of art today. We focused specifically on works that were “On View,” which allowed us to explore what audiences can actively engage with in 2025, emphasizing the theme of immediate visibility in public spaces. The metadata fields we selected included artist gender, in order to compare representation between women and men; geographic origin, to identify regional patterns of artistic production; and exhibition dates and on-view status, to connect historical patterns to present-day audiences. We chose to exclude entries where artworks were created by more than one artist, as these collaborative works were typically by two men, and rarely by women, which did not align with our project’s focus. Narrowing our scope to works currently on view and created by a single artist helped sharpen our analysis of contemporary audience experiences, though it also revealed some gaps in the MoMA’s dataset.

In terms of methodology and tools, we encountered several challenges in the process of extracting and cleaning our data. Working with an open dataset meant dealing with inconsistencies in how entries were labeled, as well as missing or incomplete information in both the original dataset and the metadata we added. For example, identifying where a work was created was not always straightforward, as many pieces lacked detailed location information. When necessary, we made the best possible approximations by listing a country instead of a city, or by leaving the field blank when no data could be found. These gaps limited our ability to include certain works in our Flourish visualization. Additionally, we standardized categories and removed columns that were unrelated to our research questions, such as artist nationality or birthplace, which could have distracted from our focus on site-specific creation and gender representation. After refining our dataset, we uploaded it into Flourish to map geographic and gender trends, and then integrated the visualizations into a Framer website to create an engaging and accessible presentation. The tools we used were essential for transforming a complex dataset into meaningful insights.

Our preliminary insights and analysis revealed several surprising patterns about the visibility of women artists and the geographic distribution of art creation. We found that major cities in countries like the United States, France, and Brazil—specifically New York, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro—stood out as hubs where artworks were created by both men and women. Over 20% of the works were created and exhibited in New York, showing a strong clustering around urban Western cultural hubs. We believe this pattern may reflect the opportunities for display and visibility that exist in large urban centers, as well as the cultural and social energy that draws artists to these spaces. Regarding women only, New York, London, and San Francisco were the geographic hubs where women were creating and displaying their art, which is on trend for all artists throughout the 21st century. In terms of overall gender representation, we observed a significant disparity: fewer works by women are currently on view at MoMA compared to works by men, which aligns with broader historical trends in gender inequity within the art world. More specifically, there are 375 works by male artists currently on view versus only 127 works made by female artists, amounting to about 25% of the total works. This gap suggests that structural barriers, whether in the form of institutional biases or systemic limitations on women’s access to the art world, continue to impact the visibility of women artists today. While the data shows fewer works by women overall, this does not imply that women were less artistic; instead, it points to the possibility that records are incomplete, or that women’s time and creative energy were often redirected toward other forms of labor or caregiving. Our findings suggest that further research is needed to fully understand the forces shaping these disparities, including the influence of economic, social, and institutional factors on women artists' careers.

Overall, our project highlights the power of collaborative, data-driven approaches to art historical research. By working as a team and engaging with digital tools, we were able to identify significant trends in the visibility of women artists throughout the 20th century that would have been difficult to uncover by simply visiting a museum or reading exhibition catalogs. By focusing on what is currently visible to the public at a major institution like MoMA, we gained a more immediate understanding of how gender and geography continue to shape cultural narratives in 2025. While our findings underscore the underrepresentation of women artists, they also reveal the importance of proximity to institutional power and access to networks of visibility concentrated in global cities like New York, London, and San Francisco. Ultimately, our findings support the continued use of digital tools to inform art historical inquiry, offering a clearer picture of representation within major institutions and prompting further reflection on how visibility is shaped over time.