Museum FAQ

We are seeking partners from museums across the whole of the United States who will consider sharing their public collection data with our research project.

We have identified 149 museums in 116 cities that have collected Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modern paintings in the United States by analyzing the AAM and the AAMD registries. To date, we have collated information on more than 6,000 artworks from 36 museums—far from enough to see the full spectrum of 150 years of American collecting. Moreover, our research has been biased towards large, East Coast museums, which make their collection data available through APIs and other easily accessible sources.

We want to change this bias and represent as broad a range of museums as possible in our data—from universities to specialized institutions. small to large collections, and from Boca Raton to Seattle. We are as much interested in outliers and atypical developments, as we are in commonalities and patterns: which objects came to be in large, East Coast museums, and which ones were collected outside of historically prominent art market routes, by whom, and why? 

For your consideration, we have prepared a FAQ about where our project came from and where it is going. If you would like to obtain any further information, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at: provenance@leuphana.de