Artist Public Collection Finder

Artist Public Collection Finder searches public cultural heritage records and museum catalogs for works by one or more named artists. It returns one normalized row per matched work, including the title, holding institution, country, creation date, medium, dimensions, acquisition details, public record URL, image URL, published rights statement, and evidence tier when available.

Use it when you need a structured starting point for artist research, curriculum planning, gallery research, collection benchmarking, or art market context. The Actor is designed for discovery across public records, not for claiming complete worldwide coverage.

Why Use This Actor

• Find public collection records for one or more artists from one simple input: artist names.
• Discover which institutions visibly hold works by that artist.
• Export work-level records with museum links, dates, medium, dimensions, credit lines, and image availability.
• Build a quick institutional footprint summary with work count, institution count, country count, and medium breakdown.
• Prioritize detailed catalog records before using sparser public knowledge graph leads.
• Distinguish official, aggregated, legacy, and knowledge graph evidence with evidenceTier.
• Keep the dataset useful for researchers: one output item equals one interpreted public collection record.

What It Produces

Each dataset row represents one public collection record for the requested artist:

• artistName
• workTitle
• institution
• institutionCountry
• objectDate, objectBeginYear, objectEndYear
• medium, dimensions, department
• acquisitionYear, creditLine
• objectUrl, imageUrl
• rightsStatus
• evidenceTier

The Actor also writes an OUTPUT key-value summary with:

• matchedWorkCount
• institutionCount
• countryCount
• topInstitutions
• countryBreakdown
• mediumBreakdown
• evidenceBreakdown
• earliestWorkYear
• latestWorkYear
• researchSummary
• artistSummaries

Source Strategy

The Actor uses no browser automation. It prefers APIs and public datasets.

Current v1 coverage combines official museum APIs, public museum datasets, an optional European cultural index, and a public knowledge graph fallback. The Actor normalizes institution aliases, merges cross-source duplicates, ranks detailed catalog records first, and uses sparse knowledge graph records only after stronger catalog matches are exhausted.

evidenceTier explains how to interpret each row without exposing internal routing: official_catalog, aggregated_catalog, legacy_catalog_snapshot, or knowledge_graph_lead. The useful research link is objectUrl.

Use Cases

• Art researchers checking where an artist appears in public collections
• Educators building reading lists, slides, or curriculum resources around artists and institutions
• Gallery teams preparing artist dossiers
• Collectors benchmarking an artist's institutional footprint
• Market researchers comparing public collection visibility across artists
• Museum professionals doing quick peer-collection discovery

How To Use It

1. Enter one or more artistNames, for example Louise Bourgeois and Leonardo da Vinci.
2. Optionally set a creation year range in dateFrom and dateTo.
3. Optionally enable onlyWorksWithImages when image availability matters more than broad coverage.
4. Run the Actor and open the dataset.
5. Check OUTPUT for the summary.

Input Example

{
  "artistNames": ["Louise Bourgeois", "Leonardo da Vinci"],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "onlyWorksWithImages": false
}

Focused research example:

{
  "artistNames": ["Louise Bourgeois"],
  "dateFrom": 1940,
  "dateTo": 2010,
  "onlyWorksWithImages": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

Europeana enrichment is not exposed as a public input. If you want Europeana included in private runs, set EUROPEANA_API_KEY as an Actor environment variable.

Input Reference

Field	Type	Description
artistNames	array	Required artist names to search. Use common catalog names.
dateFrom	integer	Optional earliest work creation year to include when a machine-readable year exists.
dateTo	integer	Optional latest work creation year to include when a machine-readable year exists.
onlyWorksWithImages	boolean	Return only rows with an image URL or thumbnail.
maxResults	integer	Maximum rows to write per artist, from 1 to 1000.
datasetId	string	Optional existing Apify dataset to append rows to.
runId	string	Optional workflow identifier copied into rows and summaries.

Output Example

{
  "artistName": "Louise Bourgeois",
  "workTitle": "Eyes",
  "institution": "The Metropolitan Museum of Art",
  "institutionCountry": "United States",
  "objectDate": "1982",
  "objectBeginYear": 1982,
  "objectEndYear": 1982,
  "medium": "Marble",
  "dimensions": "74 3/4 x 54 x 45 3/4 in. (189.9 x 137.2 x 116.2 cm)",
  "department": "Modern and Contemporary Art",
  "acquisitionYear": "1986",
  "creditLine": "Anonymous Gift, 1986",
  "objectUrl": "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/484544",
  "rightsStatus": "© Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY",
  "evidenceTier": "official_catalog"
}

API Usage

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/trovevault~artist-public-collection-finder/runs?waitForFinish=120" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "artistNames": ["Louise Bourgeois", "Leonardo da Vinci"],
    "maxResults": 50,
    "onlyWorksWithImages": false
  }'

After the run finishes, export the default dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or through the Apify API.

Why This Instead Of Searching Museum Sites Manually

Museum collection search pages are useful, but they do not share one schema. This Actor normalizes public records into one table and adds a compact summary of the artist's visible public collection footprint. It is especially useful when you need to compare institutions, prepare a spreadsheet, or use collection records in downstream analysis.

Limitations

• This is public-record discovery, not complete global coverage.
• Some museum collection records do not expose images, dimensions, acquisition details, or rights text. Empty values are omitted from JSON rows instead of being filled with null; the Actor never substitutes unknown as if it were a rights statement.
• Europeana requires an API key configured as EUROPEANA_API_KEY and focuses on European cultural heritage records.
• Knowledge graph leads may be incomplete or community-maintained. They are labeled knowledge_graph_lead and are selected only when stronger catalog records do not fill the requested result limit.
• Tate's open dataset is a historical snapshot and should be verified against the current Tate website for publication-grade work.
• Institution aliases are normalized only when the identity is known. Countries are taken from the record or resolved from a known normalized institution, not guessed from loose name fragments.
• objectBeginYear and objectEndYear describe the published creation range. A later casting or printing year mentioned in objectDate is not treated as the end of creation.
• Artist names can be ambiguous. Use the common museum catalog name and review the returned works.
• The Actor does not verify private collections, non-public inventory, loan status, or current display status.
• Exhibition history is not promised in v1 because it is not consistently available across sources.

FAQ

Is this a worldwide museum database?

No. It is a global public collection discovery tool. It combines open global and regional indexes with selected official museum sources, then normalizes the results. It should not be marketed or used as a complete worldwide inventory.

Why are there fewer results than I see on a museum website?

Some museums expose more data on their website than in their public API or dataset. Some sources also apply licensing, image, copyright, or catalog restrictions.

Can I filter by museum?

Not in v1. The Actor owns source resolution so users can ask the natural research question: "Where does this artist appear in public collections?" Use the exported dataset to filter institutions afterward.

Can I use this for commercial art market research?

Yes, as public metadata research support, subject to each source's terms and rights notices. Rights for images and underlying works vary by record.

Related Actors

Use this Actor alongside collection, artist, education, CRM, or market-research workflows when you need structured public collection evidence for an artist.

Changelog

• 0.1 Initial artist-name lookup across public cultural heritage records, with catalog-first ranking, normalized institutions, evidence tiers, and quality-aware deduplication.

Support

Open an Apify issue or contact TroveVault with the artist name, run ID, and an example record if a public collection result appears missing or mismatched.