Art galleries and shops — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is somewhere art is shown or sold — a feature tagged `tourism=gallery` or `shop=art` in OpenStreetMap. 38,075 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot coloured by which of the two it is and sized by the footprint of the premises.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the body that runs it, where a mapper noted that, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Two kinds, and why they are not folded together

Gallery — 21,128 features. Somewhere art is exhibited.
Art shop — 16,401 features. A dealer or retailer selling art.
Both — 546 features carry both tags.

The split is close to even, which is unusual: most layers on this site have one class holding the overwhelming majority. Here neither is the background the other stands out against, so both are given a full-strength colour.

They are kept apart because they answer different questions. A gallery is somewhere you go to look; an art shop is somewhere you go to buy. Someone planning an afternoon and someone looking for a dealer want different halves of the same map.

The 546 that are both are not an error. A commercial gallery genuinely exhibits and sells, and in the art trade that is the norm rather than a mistake. Such a feature is drawn as a gallery — what a passer-by would call it — and the details panel shows what it actually claims.

Public art museums are not here

A museum of art carries `tourism=museum`, not `tourism=gallery`, and is on the museums layer instead. `tourism=gallery` is specifically the exhibiting space. The line is not always drawn consistently by mappers, so a handful of institutions could reasonably sit on either map.

Four features in five are a point, not a shape

81.0% of this layer has no footprint at all — the highest share of any layer on HueMaps. Only 7,234 of the 38,075 features are traced as an outline.

The reason is what these places are. A gallery or an art shop is usually a unit inside a larger building — a shopfront on a street, a floor of an office block — and a mapper marks a point rather than drawing around something that is not a building of its own.

So on this layer the size of a dot is mostly not telling you how large the place is. Most dots are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of the ones that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

Where the map is thickest

Counted crudely — features inside a bounding box, per million people — France leads at about 102, then the Netherlands at 85, Germany at 61 and the United Kingdom at 47. The United States has 23, China 1.5 and India 0.5. Germany against India is roughly 131 to 1.

The densest single view anywhere is the Paris region, with around 1,230 features on one screen. That is the same region that topped the arts centres layer this one replaced, and the explanation is the same mixture: France really does have a dense commercial and municipal art scene, and French OpenStreetMap contributors map it thoroughly. Neither half of that explanation is sufficient on its own, and this page does not pretend to separate them.

In absolute numbers the United States holds the most (7,851), with France second (6,908).

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a shop front they walked past; nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no trade register or gallery directory has been merged in.

What is in and what is out

Sculpture parks are here, and they are the largest features by a long way. Hogpen Hill Farms in Connecticut is 930,881 m², Mutonia Sculpture Park in South Australia 435,002, Jupiter Artland near Edinburgh 307,573. An outdoor art park carries `tourism=gallery` legitimately, so they stay — but they are three orders of magnitude above the median of 220 m², and the size scale is deliberately capped below them so that ordinary galleries remain distinguishable from one another.

Commercial art dealers, print shops, framing shops that also sell art, and artists' materials suppliers all appear under `shop=art` to varying degrees, depending on how the mapper read the tag. There is no reliable way to separate a dealer from a supplier, so both are here.

Galleries inside museums, universities and hotels are here where somebody mapped them separately, which will be inconsistent.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the fifth of features that are traced, the median footprint is 220 m², the 90th percentile 1,376 m² and the 99th 14,446 m². The scale is set differently at far and close zoom so that both a shop unit and a sculpture park remain readable.

92.9% carry a name — the second-highest share on the site. Very little art is sold anonymously.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. Galleries and art shops open and close more often than most subjects mapped here, so expect this layer to drift out of date faster than, say, the observatories one.