MoMA puts Du Bois-inspired data portraits in focus at free exhibition

The Museum of Modern Art drew attention on September 30 to a W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired print project now on view in Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, its free street-level exhibition in Manhattan. The show opened September 27 and brings together 30 works that ask how visual choices shape the way people understand information.

MoMA’s September 30 essay, by curators Paola Antonelli and Jules Bernstein, discusses Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century, a 2026 project in the museum’s collection. The essay adds detail to the exhibition NewsJaws reported when it opened; it does not say the prints were installed on September 30.

Where to see Full Disclosure for free

MoMA says Full Disclosure is in its street-level gallery, which is free and accessible to the public. Its exhibition listing places the show on Floor 1, in gallery 1 South, at 11 West 53rd Street. The exhibition is scheduled to run through June 13, 2027. The free access applies to that gallery; visitors should use the museum’s exhibition information when planning a visit.

The museum calls it its first exhibition devoted entirely to information design. It includes 30 digital and analog works, six of them newly acquired. Antonelli organized the show with curatorial assistant Bernstein and fellow Forrest Pelsue. Its premise is that a visualization involves decisions about what information to select, how to present it and what a viewer is invited to trust.

What the Du Bois-inspired prints show

MoMA describes methods ranging from woodcut, etching and screenprint to hand-applied gouache, geospatial mapping and computational analysis. Those methods matter to the exhibition’s central question: a data portrait is a designed account, made through choices of material, scale and arrangement as well as through the underlying figures. The museum’s essay presents the project as a contemporary engagement with Du Bois’s earlier visual work.

The museum’s collection record identifies Occupations of Black Americans 1900–2021 as a recent acquisition newly on view in gallery 1 South. It describes a screenprint and digital print with a cut-and-pasted reproduction of a Du Bois data portrait. The same record lists Black Migration to the U.S. and Black Homeowners in the States & Territories of the U.S. as newly on view. These named works give visitors specific prints to look for; the records do not establish that all 30 prints in the project are displayed together.

How other works make data choices visible

MoMA’s press materials also identify Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Dear Data, and Ed Hawkins’s Warming Stripes among the exhibition works. They approach information at markedly different scales, from personal records to broad systems and long-term climate measurements. Seeing them together lets visitors compare what a visual format brings forward and what it leaves for a viewer to interpret.

Writing after a September 29 gallery visit, Elmer Yglesias described Warming Stripes as bands of color representing annual global temperatures from 1850 onward. He observed that the work has no axes, labels or numbers on its surface. Its stripped-down form makes the warming pattern immediately visible, while the absence of conventional chart details also makes the viewer consider how the image communicates evidence.

Yglesias described Dear Data as hand-drawn postcards about personal information and Calculating Empires as a dense map of technology and power. He also discussed History Flow, which makes changes to Wikipedia entries visible. His account shows the range of questions posed by the works: data can record daily habits, trace institutional connections or expose how a shared text changes over time.

What visitors can use to explore the show

Yglesias reported finding laminated section cards in the gallery, as well as introductory texts, extended labels and a short audio guide online. MoMA’s exhibition listing identifies four audio segments. Those materials offer routes into works that may be difficult to read at a glance, particularly visualizations built from many connections or layers of information.

Yglesias praised the exhibition’s range but argued that one room and 30 works cannot adequately cover the field of information design. That is his assessment as a visitor. MoMA presents Full Disclosure as a focused exhibition of works from a practice it considers central to its design collection. For visitors, the newly discussed Du Bois-inspired prints provide a concrete way into that larger subject: they show how a historical visual language can be used to present contemporary data.