Artifact World Gallery
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About

Artifact World Gallery

Artifact World Gallery is an open catalog of 192,829 artworks — every one in the public domain, drawn from more than a thousand museums, free to study, download, and share. We keep the records honest: titles, dates, and attributions as the holding institutions publish them, sources cited, corrections welcome. And we connect what single museums can't — a Bierstadt in New York hangs here beside its kin in Washington and Boston, joined by movement, era, subject, and color. Because these works belong to everyone, we also print them properly: archival paper, pigment ink, made to order, built to keep.

192,829 works · 1,000+ museums · all public domain

The corpus

The catalog holds 192,829 openly licensed (CC0 / public-domain) artworks by 28,000+ artists, drawn from 1,000+ museums and open cultural archives. Tap any artwork and its kin appear — the same artist, a shared movement, a neighboring period, a common subject or palette. An Impressionist landscape sits beside its contemporaries; a predominantly blue canvas finds others in its hue. Every artwork, artist, and movement page leads to related works across these dimensions.

The record-keeping

Titles, dates, artists, and attributions stay as the holding institutions publish them. Descriptive notes are written in our own voice rather than copied from sources, and sourced sections carry their citations. Records state facts; essays carry opinions — never the other way around. The same care extends to the prints: how we verify provenance and reproduce a work is set out on the quality & provenance page.

Spotted an error? Corrections are welcome — write to support@artifactworldgallery.com and we will check the record against the source.

Who built this

Artifact World Gallery is made by Alexander Knigge, a developer who wanted to stop scrolling through endless grids and start seeing how works of art connect. The iOS app launched first; this website brings the same catalog to the open web, with essays drawn from the collection and made-to-order prints of works in the public domain.

More about Alexander and his other work is at alexanderknigge.com.

Onward