(1) Overview
Repository location
https://borealisdata.ca/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.5683/SP3/BNGNE1
Context
The Canada Council Art Bank (the Art Bank) is housed under the Canada Council for the Arts, the national funding body for artistic activity in Canada. This is the world’s largest collection of contemporary Canadian art. The Art Bank currently operates under a cost-recovery model wherein their main activity (art rentals to public and private clients across Canada) financially supports the administration of the collection.
Open data on the contents of the collection available online does not address the fluid and interconnected temporal and spatial presence of their activities since 1972. Multiple sources are put in relation in this dataset to reveal connections amongst artworks and details around their display histories that are obscured in standard spreadsheets. This event-centred approach reveals insights about the collection’s priorities and decisions over time and supports current work to contend with difficult and cyclical historical realities.
Starting from 38 selected focus events (or exhibition projects), this dataset identifies 1021 artworks, their 552 artists, and a tracking history for each artwork totalling to 10,968 events in which these artworks were displayed. A full list of exhibition projects was compiled from physical and digital archival materials, and additional contextualizing data was pulled together from multiple sources to address gaps and inconsistencies in the institution’s data practices. This dataset is part of the author’s master’s thesis (Van Hoeve, 2024), and all components created for this thesis are openly accessible online.1
(2) Method
The creation of the dataset involved three sources:
Open Data (Canada Council Art Bank, 2022) spreadsheets containing basic information for each piece in the collection. Following additional research (see step 2), the expanded spreadsheets were imported into Microsoft Access as Artists (Table 1) and Artworks (Table 2).
Archival and oral research was completed to expand areas of the dataset. The Open Data only contained basic information about each artwork, and Art Rental Client Activity (ARCA – the Art Bank’s in-house database) contains inconsistent information, especially for events prior to 2000. Archival resources consulted at the Art Bank included exhibition catalogues and correspondence, and conversational interviews2 were completed with 19 people.
ARCA export (Canada Council for the Arts & Bélanger, 2023). The placement history of each artwork was downloaded from ARCA as a spreadsheet, then cleaned and imported into Access as Events (Table 3). A query (Figure 1) was then built to pull the tracking history of each artwork featured in 38 focus events. The query results were downloaded and used to model the data.
Table 1
Artists.3
| VARIABLE | TYPE | DESCRIPTION AND REASONING |
|---|---|---|
| Person Key | Text | A unique identification code for each artist. Same field as Person Key in the Artworks table. |
| Family Name | Text | Parsed from the original Name field (which became Full Name for this research) provided in the Open Data table. |
| Full Name | Text | Name used for the artist or the group of artists (collective). |
| Given Name | Text | Parsed from the original Name field (which became Full Name for this research) provided in the Open Data table. |
| Name Iterations | Text | Other names for the same artist that were encountered during this research. |
Table 2
Artworks.
| VARIABLE | TYPE | DESCRIPTION AND REASONING |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition Initiative | Text | Indicates whether the artwork was acquired as part of a special acquisition initiative. |
| Artwork Key(ID Number) | Text | A unique identifier assigned by the Art Bank to each work in the collection. Same field as Artwork Key in the Artists table. |
| Artwork Title | Text | Title of the artwork as given by the artist(s). |
| Dated-ness | Text | Retainer for any ambiguity from the Year of Creation. |
| Divested? | Text | Used to identify artworks no longer in the Art Bank’s collection. |
| Full Name | Text | Name used for the artist or the group of artists (collective). |
| Image | Hyperlink | A link to an image for each artwork currently in the collection. |
| Medium | Text | The medium of the artwork, as specified by the artist(s). |
| Person Key | Text | A unique identification code for each artist. Same field as Person Key in the Artists table. |
| Series Name | Text | Used for artworks that are a series of individually entered pieces. |
| Year of Acquisition | Number | The year that the artwork was acquired by the Art Bank. ID Number was used to extract the Year of Acquisition for each artwork. |
| Year of Creation | Number | When the artwork was created, as specified by the artist(s). See Dated-ness as this data was cleaned. |
| Year of Creation vs. Year of Acquisition | Number | Measures the difference between an artwork’s Year of Acquisition and their creation. |
Table 3
Events.
| VARIABLE | TYPE | DESCRIPTION AND REASONING |
|---|---|---|
| Artwork Key(ID Number) | Text | A unique identifier assigned by the Art Bank to each work in the collection. Same field as Artwork Key in the Artists table. |
| Client | Text | The name of the institution/partner involved with the event. |
| Display Instance | Number | The number of times the artwork has been displayed, including the focus event. |
| Event Name | Text | The name of the display event. If the event was not one of the 38 focus events, it is named “Other”. |
| Installation Date | Number | The date that the artwork was installed for the event. |
| Link | Hyperlink | A link associated with the event. |
Location
| Text & Number | Various levels of data for the location where the event took place. |
| Notes | Text | Any notes encountered on the event during research that do not fit in with other fields. |
| Phase | Text | The thesis research phase that the event aligns with. |
| Return Date | Number | The date that the artwork was returned from the event. |
| Sources | Text | Resources referenced in researching this event. |
| Status | Text | The type of event. Types include exhibitions, special projects, rentals, and loans. |
Figure 1
Relationships between tables in Access. The TrackingHistory query extracts data for the 38 events this project focuses on.
Sampling strategy
From 1972–2022, the exhibition events the Art Bank was involved with, can be understood through two categories: external events that the Art Bank was approached about and passively involved with, and internal events that the Art Bank strategically initiated and implemented. Internal events are of strategic importance to the Art Bank and to their self-perceived identity and role in Canadian arts. A list of 87 such internal events was made,4 then narrowed to 38 focus events based on criteria (including strategic partnerships, travelling exhibitions, and exhibitions in Âjagemô)5 aligning with the Art Bank’s mandate to bring contemporary art to the Canadian public.
(3) Dataset Description
Repository name
Borealis
Object name
ARTiculatingCanadianIdentities_ArtBankData
Format names and versions
Excel (.csv); .txt
Creation dates
Approximately 2023-09 to 2024-04
Dataset creators
Van Hoeve, Jacoba Krina (Janneke) | Roles: Conceptualization; Data curation; Investigation; Methodology; Visualization; Writing – original draft | Affiliation: Carleton University.
Bélanger, Patrick | Role: Resources | Affiliation: Canada Council for the Arts.
Jenkins, Amy | Role: Resources | Affiliation: Canada Council for the Arts.
Young, Martha | Role: Resources | Affiliation: Canada Council for the Arts.
Tayler, Felicity | Roles: Conceptualization; Supervision | Affiliation: University of Ottawa.
Tiampo, Ming | Roles: Conceptualization; Supervision | Affiliation: Carleton University.
Language
English
License
CC0 1.0 Universal
Publication date
2024-05-10
(4) Reuse Potential
Prior to this project, the Art Bank’s public data was primarily available in spreadsheet format. This is problematic because the collection is public, but data and information about the collection are not intellectually accessible. Diverse formats (including the interactive visual models and contextualization, beyond the relational database, contributed by this project) allow more people to access, understand, and use valuable information about the collection.
This dataset reinforces and encourages the ability of similar relational and interactive data work to reveal fluid, interconnected temporal and spatial dynamics of cultural collections (Dymond, 2019; Greenwald, 2021; Tayler, 2023). New knowledge about collections is approached through networks that reveal a web of connections between institutions involved in exhibition and display events (Lincoln, 2020). A tracking history allows display histories of artworks to be plotted across space and time, enhancing discussions around the impact of and connections between artworks, artists, and themes within collections. Relational databases support restorative and self-reflective work that art institutions face in the current climate of contending with difficult cyclical histories (Dávila, 2024; Risam, 2019).
Examples of further potential work with this specific dataset include: (1) researching the impact of the Art Bank’s contributions to Canadian art collections through divestment and deaccessioning activities (Van Hoeve, 2024); (2) enriching the understanding of artistic identities represented in the collection (Alsaden, 2022) using artists represented in the margins of this dataset as a starting point;6 and (3) comparative analysis of this dataset with similar federal governmental collections,7 and those of other art institutions (Dymond, 2019).
Limitations surrounding this dataset stem from the data sources used. Inconsistencies between data entries in ARCA can be attributed to factors including shifting norms in information management practices, and human error. For example, the 2018 international travelling exhibition Awakening | Éveil is missing locations and dates in ARCA, resulting in gaps in the display histories for all artworks involved.
Notes
[1] https://padlet.com/janneke_vanhoeve/articulating-canadian-identities-wqiubjho73eyge1e. Last accessed Nov. 2, 2024.
[2] Transcriptions of these interviews are not publicly available. However, content from these interviews is heavily cited throughout the researcher’s master’s thesis.
[4] This list can be found here: https://www.preceden.com/timelines/1056135-ccab-events/50020b67ff75cf36. Last accessed Nov. 2, 2024.
[5] Âjagemô, Algonquin for “crossroads,” is a high-traffic public exhibition space in the building housing the Canada Council for the Arts in 2014.
[6] Self-identification became a standard practice during acquisitions in the late 2010s (Canada Council for the Arts, 2022). With the majority (67%) of the collection in 2022 having been acquired in the 1970s and 1980s, there is an imbalance in the Art Bank’s data about artists and their identities.
Acknowledgements
In addition to contributors acknowledged above, 19 people made significant contributions to this project through discussions around exhibitions, artists, and other topics (see Van Hoeve, 2024).
Competing interests
This research was conducted under an ethics clearance from Carleton University (#120087). A Research Undertaking Agreement was signed between the author and the Canada Council for the Arts on August 9th, 2023, and the author completed a practicum placement involving archival work at the Art Bank in July and August of 2023.
Author Information
Jacoba Krina (Janneke) Van Hoeve: Conceptualization; Data curation; Investigation; Methodology; Visualization; Writing – original draft.