About Open Art

Open Art publishes public-domain artworks, posted to the Bluesky account @open-art.bsky.social and documented here with texts drawn from museum records and encyclopedic sources.

The project started as a way to learn: about coding, about collecting, and about art history. It grew into something more deliberate: a small archive that tries to make open information easy to find and pleasant to read.

A lot of information about art history already exists. Museums hold enormous amounts of it. But it is often hard to reach, scattered across different systems, or presented in ways that feel more like a catalogue than something you would want to browse. The goal here is the opposite: simple pages, good images, clear facts. Something you can scroll through and stumble upon an artist you have never heard of before.

If you are looking for references, wanting to understand a period, or just curious about who made what and when, this is meant to be a useful starting point. Find an artist you like, read a little, follow the thread.

Open Art has no ambition to cost money. Information should be accessible and free for everyone. The longer aim is for this to become a structured, crawlable record of art-historical information that anyone can use freely. No paywalls, no subscriptions. Just artworks and facts.

The museums represented here are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. They are included because they offer well-documented, open APIs that make it straightforward to build with their collections. All images are in the public domain. The texts draw on museum catalogue data and Wikipedia.

Open Art is a project by Olof Broström, an artist and inventor based in Sweden.