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Public Art Archive

Exploring public art collections across the world

/ Back End Development / Dev Ops / Front End Development / UX/UI Design / Web Application Development
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Intro

Creative West (formerly WESTAF) is a nonprofit organization supporting artists, cultural organizations, and public agencies across the United States. Among its flagship initiatives is the Public Art Archive, a global platform dedicated to documenting and sharing art collections in the public sphere.

Public art exists in cities, parks, campuses, and civic spaces around the world, but information about these works is often fragmented across thousands of local government and institutional databases. The Public Art Archive was created to bring these collections together in a single digital platform, making public art more accessible to researchers, curators, artists, and the general public.

Creative West partnered with Bilberrry to modernize the application, redesigning the user experience and rebuilding the platform to support powerful search, mapping, and discovery tools while integrating seamlessly with the underlying collection management system.

The result is a modern, scalable platform that allows users to explore tens of thousands of public artworks and collections across the United States and globally.

The Goal

Design and build a modern, intuitive platform that makes global public art collections easier to discover, explore, and share—serving a wide range of users including artists, curators, cultural organizations, and the public.

The Challenge

Public art collections are inherently distributed. Cities, museums, universities, and cultural organizations all maintain their own records of artworks, often using different systems and data standards.

The Public Art Archive aggregates artwork data from many of these institutions, creating a unified resource for discovering and exploring the art. But the legacy applications supporting the archive had become increasingly difficult to maintain and expand, lacked much desired functionality, and did not meet accessibility, usability, and mobile user needs.

Key priorities of the project were to:

  • Provide powerful search and discovery across a rapidly expanding dataset
  • Support location-based exploration of public artworks
  • Present detailed artwork records and collection information
  • Scale as new collections and institutions joined the archive
  • Deliver a responsive, modern user experience across devices, with a specific emphasis on mobile users exploring art in real-time on the go

The challenge was not simply rebuilding the application, it was creating a cohesive experience that could unify several legacy tools into a single platform while preserving existing links and public access points.

The Approach

Bilberrry began the engagement with a technical discovery and code audit to understand the existing architecture, identify pain points, and prioritize improvements for the legacy applications.

Working closely with Creative West stakeholders, the team defined a roadmap for rearchitecting and redesigning the platform into a modern web experience.

The design and development effort focused on several key principles:

  • Simplify how users discover and explore public art collections
  • Unify multiple legacy tools into a cohesive application
  • Enable powerful search and filtering across artwork metadata
  • Support location-based exploration through interactive maps
  • Ensure the platform could scale as the archive grows
  • Deliver a responsive experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices

This work established a foundation for a modern, scalable Public Art Archive platform.

The Solution

Bilberrry designed and developed a new Public Art Archive web application that brings together powerful discovery tools, interactive maps, and detailed artwork records into a unified experience.

Artwork Discovery

The platform enables users to search and browse a global catalog of public artworks through powerful filtering and search capabilities.

Users can explore artworks by:

  • Artist
  • Location
  • Collection or organization
  • Artwork type and materials
  • Keywords and descriptive metadata

This flexible discovery experience allows users to quickly find specific artworks or explore broader themes and collections.

Interactive Map Exploration

Public art is inherently tied to place. The platform integrates interactive mapping tools that allow users to discover artworks geographically.

Through the map interface, users can:

  • Explore artworks near their location
  • Navigate collections across cities, regions, or countries
  • View clusters of artworks within specific geographic areas
  • Jump directly from map views to detailed artwork records

This spatial exploration helps users connect artworks with the communities and landscapes where they are installed.

Artwork and Collection Profiles

Each artwork in the archive has a dedicated profile page containing detailed information and media.

These pages allow users to:

  • View artwork images and descriptions
  • Learn about the artist and commissioning organization
  • Explore the artwork’s location and installation details
  • Discover related works within the same collection

By organizing data around individual artworks and collections, the platform provides meaningful context for understanding public art. It also allows for easier referencing, discovering, and sharing online, which in turn improves search engine optimization.

Platform Architecture

The Public Art Archive was rebuilt as a modern platform composed of modular applications, APIs, and services rather than a single monolithic system. A middleware layer developed by Bilberrry integrates with the CollectionSpace content management system, which serves as the source of truth for artwork data, while a scalable search index and API layer power fast, flexible discovery across the archive.
This architecture creates a reliable foundation for future growth, enabling Creative West to extend the platform beyond the primary web interface to additional user experiences, including mobile applications, partner integrations, and new tools for institutions contributing to the archive.

The Impact

The redesigned Public Art Archive platform makes it easier than ever to discover and explore public art collections.

Artists, curators, researchers, and cultural organizations can now access a centralized archive of public artworks from around the world. Cities and institutions gain greater visibility for their collections, while the public can more easily explore the artworks that shape civic spaces.

By modernizing the platform and unifying several legacy tools into a cohesive experience, Creative West now has a scalable digital foundation for expanding the Public Art Archive and continuing its mission to document and celebrate public art.