Chronicles of Artist Exhibitions: Exploring Temporal Patterns in Artists' Co-Exhibition Activity Using Visual Analytics

Abstract

Art History is a visual-oriented discipline. However, it lacks interactive visual data exploration tools. We introduce a Visual Analytics approach tailored to this domain, addressing key challenges in exploring the temporal patterns in artists' exhibition behaviors between 1905 and 1915; a pivotal period marking the start of modern Avant-garde artistic movements. Unveiling the exhibition practices of artists by exploring their temporal patterns and exhibition behavior enables domain experts to gain novel perspectives and insights about strategies, collaborations, and influences that shaped 20th-century Avant-gardes. Our transdisciplinary approach, jointly developed by visualization and art history researchers, offers interactive visual representations to support data-driven insights and research for this domain's intricate and complex data. We propose a multiple coordinated views approach that consists of an interactive timeline, dynamic ego network, and structured tabular overview to tackle different research questions, facilitate in-depth analysis, and enable comparison of artists' exhibition behaviors. The outcomes of our evaluation, structured as dual expert interviews, emphasize the intuitiveness of the representations and how data-driven insights can be extracted with the support of our approach. Our paper addresses a compelling problem in Art History, offering an effective Visual Analytics solution and outlining the broader implications and positive outcomes.