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Where Art Lives: A Seattle Public Art Map

Have you ever wanted to explore Seattle's public art but don't know where to start? This interactive map includes over 300 public art works in the Seattle area, allowing users to explore worlds by site type, artist locality, and thematic focus. Created by five students in the Digital Arts History (ART H 209) class at the University of Washington, our goal was to analyze the specific themes within these artworks and how they relate to their community and chosen sites.

James Luna "Petroglyphs in Motion"
Stuart Nakamura "Just Trespassing"
Ross Matteson "Northern Flicker Monument."

Tools/Methods and Findings

Original Dataset

Explore The Map

Developing our Dataset

Credits & Contributions

Goals

To understand how these pieces relate to their community we wanted to look into the artists themselves. How does an artist's locality affect the subject of their art? Do they create art celebrating Washington's lush environment?

Next, while analyzing our data, noticed that a large portion of public art work in Seattle are located within educational institutions. This lead us to the question, what art is shown to differing age groups? Do they get more complex as the audience ages? What messages are shown to children compared to young adults?

Last, we also saw that the other art pieces are located within non educational spaces, such as courts or administrative buildings. We wanted to see how these works differ thematically from educational spaces.

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