Loading the Data

Data source

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Collection hosts a database of the museum’s collection, with monthly updates. The project is best described in their own words:

“MoMA is committed to helping everyone understand, enjoy, and use our collection. The Museum’s website features 75,112 artworks from 21,218 artists. This research dataset contains 131,585 records, representing all of the works that have been accessioned into MoMA’s collection and cataloged in our database. It includes basic metadata for each work, including title, artist, date made, medium, dimensions, and date acquired by the Museum. Some of these records have incomplete information and are noted as not Curator Approved.”

It’s possible to retrieve versions of the artist collection for the last months using git and git lfs commands. From one month to the next, lots of the data remains unchanged, and some are updated.

Data retrieval

We’ll be using the given SQL code to retrieve the data in our database.