In the early 1900s, there were not a lot of known female artists. In a dataset of 700 artists born between 1920 and 1935, only 95 were identified as female. I created an illustrated timeline that showcases the works of some of these female artists.
As mentioned, the dataset used to collect the data for the timeline featured 700 artists from the Tate Museum’s database. In order to make a proper timeline, I had to be very selective. According to TimelineJS, the website I used to make the timeline, having more than 20 slides can seem over-crowded.
Taking that into consideration, I have to be very specific as to what I wanted to represent in the timeline. After taking out the male and non-gender-specified artists, I was left with 94 female artists. To shrink the size some more, I only considered female artists that had a birth and death year listed which brought the number down to around 35. Being nitpicky, I only chose artists that had at least a photo of one of their artworks on the Tate website. Finally, I settled on female artists who were identified as painters since there are various mediums in art. In the end, I had 15 artists who fit the specifications.
Using a Google Spreadsheet and HTML, I created and published the timeline below:
Each slide contains:
- name of the artist
- birth date / death date
- a list of artworks they have done (but not all of them)
- link to the artists’ profile on the Tate website
- a photo of one of their artworks
What use does this data have? I think that any representation of underrepresented groups brings light to the issue that these groups are underrepresented. We may never know if there were more female painters that were born during that time period because their works weren’t recorded. Even though my timeline only shows 15 out of 94 female artists, take into consideration that 94 out of 700 is such a small percentage of female artists.
