A few days ago, fresh out of finishing my master’s thesis in art history, I felt the itch to start something new. Something fun, but also meaningful. That’s how SMK Data Visualized came to life, a small passion project powered by the SMK API, where I explore one question that has long intrigued me: how is gender represented in Denmark’s national art collection?

SMK, Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, holds around 200,000 artworks spanning 700 years. Through its open API, SMK gives access to metadata on most of these works, including information about artist gender, acquisition dates, dimensions, and more.

What the Project Does

On my website, smk.nordquist.co, I unpack SMK’s collection. Here are some of the key areas I analyze:

• Collection overview: How many works by male, female, or “unknown gender” artists are in the collection? What’s the split generally, and how does it change over time?
• Acquisitions over time: When were works by different genders acquired? Do we see a shift, say, in recent decades toward more female artists?
• Acquisition lag: I look at how long after a work was made it was acquired. This helps highlight whether works by women are collected contemporaneously, or rediscovered later.
• Display rates: Are works by female artists less likely to be on show or do they catch up?
• Dimensions and scale: Do works by male and female artists differ in size? Historically, bigger pieces often got more attention, is that still true?
• Depiction vs creator: In the subset of works where the depicted person is identified, I explore who artists paint. Do male artists paint men more often? What about female artists?
• Technique, nationality, material: I also break down what mediums, techniques, and national backgrounds are represented in relation to gender.

Why This Matters

SMK itself is already thinking about gender in its strategy: its 2022–2025 plan explicitly mentions gender as a parameter in its collecting strategy. By visualizing this data, I hope to contribute to that conversation but in a way that’s accessible, exploratory, and open-ended.

Because the data come from SMK’s openly available API, this isn’t just a personal project. It’s a way to reuse existing museum infrastructure to spark conversations, raise awareness, and maybe even inspire others to build their own tools or ask their own questions. SMK has encouraged this kind of “creative re-use.”

A Bit of Reflection

Working on this has reminded me how powerful it is to combine art history and data. With every chart and interactive graph, I feel like I’m looking under the hood of a national collection. It’s not just about seeing representations, it’s about seeing patterns, gaps, and change over time.

For me, this project is a bridge. It’s the bridge between my academic work, where I was analyzing historical contexts, and a more playful, experimental space where I build tools. It’s also a reminder: even in centuries-old institutions, there’s room for new perspectives, especially ones grounded in data.

The plan, going forward, is to expand the scope and explore other aspects than gender in the collection.