Item talk:Q24831

The Asian American Arts Centre Exhibition History Wikibase Project Page

Background

The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in New York City. Since its formation in 1974, AAAC has served to support Asian American cultural growth and the preservation of Asian American art through its curatorial activities and community-focused programming. Its range of activities includes exhibitions, performances, panel discussions, community gatherings, and conferences.

Parallel to its calendar of events, AAAC has additionally maintained a permanent collection of art works throughout the decades, as well as an artist files and an archive of its own publications, such as newspapers, press releases, and exhibition flyers. In 2009 AAAC launched the digital archive artasiamerica.org, providing access to thousands of resources from these collections.

Project Description

Shifts in arts funding since the early 2000s have negatively impacted the Asian American Arts Centre’s ability to its meet operating costs, including the inability to adequately maintain its digital archive. In response, Semantic Lab partnered with AAAC in 2022 to proactively design a strategy that could ensure the continued discovery of resources from the digital archive. Through the support of an Equity in Action grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), the partners targeted a group of materials that could best represent the scope of AAAC’s work, while finding a solution that could remove the burden of upkeep and maintenance away from AAAC.

AAAC’s collection of over 100 exhibition and event flyers was selected for digitization and contribution to Wikimedia Commons as part of the Equity in Action grant. Records for exhibitions and events, as well as for participating artists and organizations, were created on Wikidata to apply as structured data to the files on Commons. These activities simultaneously served to expand the available linked open data on the web relating to Asian American contemporary art and New York City’s counter-culture scene of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Records created on Wikidata in the scope of this project were crosswalked into Semantic Lab’s Wikibase to create stub records, conforming to and expanding Semantic Lab’s existing data model. These records are now available for querying via SPARQL or for further incorporation into projects conducted by Semantic Lab, either within the scope of the Asian American Art Centre’s specific history or in aggregate with other projects on Semantic Lab’s Wikibase.

Scope

Exhibition and Event Records

Records were created for all Asian American Arts Centre exhibitions and events relating to contemporary art as represented in AAAC’s physical exhibition flyer collection. The flyers themselves, as well as the exhibition timeline that appears on AAAC’s website, were used as information sources to create these records.

Asian American Arts Centre Exhibition History: Event Entity (targeted baseline)

Property PID	Qualifier PID	Property label	Value (examples in cursive)
P1		instance of	event (Q19071)
P1		instance of	art exhibition (Q22395)*
P11		part of project	Asian American Arts Centre Exhibition History (Q24831)
P198		organizer	Asian American Arts Centre (Q25483)
P125		location	Asian American Arts Centre (Q25483)
P125		location	New York City (Q19486)
P75		contributor	Niizeki Hiromi (Q25351)
	P75 => P117	role	artist (Q19157)
	P75 => P117	role	speaker (Q23510)**
P197		curator	Corky Lee (Q25320)
P8		Wikidata QID	Q111487420
P9		Wikidata URI	http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q111487420
P120		start time	29 October 1999
P121		end time	14 December 1999
P98		date	10 October 1998

*All events, whether a panel discussion or exhibition, are instances of “event”, typically accompanied by a second value providing more detail, such as “art exhibition” or “walking tour”. For a full list of event types under the Asian American Exhibition History project, see the SPARQL query section below.

**Apart from “organizer” and “curator” which are designated properties as shown above, the property “contributor” is used to indicate participation in an event, which is further qualified using “role”. For a full list of contributor roles in use for the Asian American Exhibition History project, see the SPARQL query section below.