Art galleries and shops — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is somewhere art is shown or sold. There are more than 37,000 worldwide. Colour represents which of the two it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the premises. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every feature here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a shopfront they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any trade register or gallery directory.

What we include

Two exact tags:

`tourism=gallery` is a space where art is exhibited, and more than 20,000 features carry it.
`shop=art` is a dealer or a retailer selling art, and more than 16,000 features carry it. Print sellers, framers who also sell art and suppliers of artists' materials all appear under it, and there is no reliable way to tell a dealer from a supplier.

Fewer than a thousand features carry both tags, and we draw those as galleries. A commercial gallery genuinely exhibits and sells, so that pairing is the norm in the art trade rather than a mistake. Galleries inside museums, universities and hotels are here where somebody mapped them separately, which mappers have done inconsistently.

Colour

Colour represents which of the two a place is. They share a map because they answer different questions. A gallery is somewhere you go to look, and an art shop is somewhere you go to buy, so someone planning an afternoon and someone looking for a dealer want different halves of the same map. The split between the two is close to even, so neither is a background the other stands out against, and we give both a full strength colour.

Art museums are not here

A museum of art carries `tourism=museum` rather than `tourism=gallery`, so it sits on the museums layer instead. `tourism=gallery` is meant for the exhibiting space rather than the institution. Mappers do not apply that distinction consistently, so a few bodies could reasonably appear on either map.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the feature in square metres. About four features in five have no outline at all, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for most of this map the size is not telling you how large the place is. A gallery or an art shop is usually a unit inside a larger building, a shopfront on a street or a floor of an office block, and a mapper marks a point rather than tracing around a building that belongs to something else. Among the features that do have a shape, a typical one covers about 220 m².

Sculpture parks are the largest features by a wide margin. An outdoor art park carries `tourism=gallery` legitimately, so we keep them, and the largest covers more than 900,000 m². We cap the size scale far below that so ordinary galleries stay distinguishable from one another.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a gallery or a shop there, not that a place has none. Coverage is strongest in western Europe and other well mapped regions. Where a commercial art trade is dense, its mappers are often active as well, and the two effects add together in a way we cannot separate.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. Galleries and art shops open and close more often than most of what we map, so a feature shown here may have gone.

Source and licence

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