MoMA opens free information design exhibition with 30 works

The Museum of Modern Art opened Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design in its free, street-level gallery in New York on September 27, 2026. The museum calls it its first exhibition devoted entirely to information design. Its 30 digital and analog works, including six newly acquired pieces, offer visitors a way to examine how graphics shape their understanding of subjects ranging from temperature to personal habits.

The exhibition is scheduled to run through June 13, 2027. The free access MoMA describes applies to this street-level gallery; the available exhibition information does not establish admission arrangements for the rest of the museum. MoMA identifies Paola Antonelli, Jules Bernstein and Forrest Pelsue as the show’s organizers.

What visitors can see in Full Disclosure

Ed Hawkins’s Warming Stripes is the first work visitors encounter on entering, according to a Fast Company walkthrough by Rachel Kurzius. The graphic uses a progression of blue and red stripes to represent annual average temperatures. MoMA identifies the version in its exhibition materials as covering 1850 through 2025. It is a compact example of the show’s subject: a design decision can turn a long sequence of measurements into a pattern visible at a glance.

Another section turns toward personal information. Fast Company describes a display that includes Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Dear Data correspondence; MoMA lists their 2015 work Dear Data: Week 14 (Abstract Productivity / A Week of Schedules) among the exhibition images. Putting an account of schedules beside other kinds of data graphics broadens the question visitors can bring to the room: what was counted, and what form did its makers choose to give it?

The museum also lists Black Migration to the U.S. (1/2), a 2026 screenprint by William Villalongo and Shraddha Ramani, from Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century. The University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio says the larger project updates W.E.B. Du Bois’s visualizations for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair using contemporary data and perspectives. MoMA’s listing identifies this print; it does not say the full portfolio is on display.

How the displayed graphics connect to longer projects

Graphicstudio describes Printing Black America as a 30-print portfolio made with six publishers, each contributing five images. It says the project’s questions, data sources and research methods were developed with historian Nell Painter and Clark Atlanta University’s Center for Africana Digital Humanities Lab. That background gives visitors a more precise frame for the MoMA print: it belongs to a collaborative project that revisits an earlier use of data portraits to depict Black American life.

MoMA’s selection also includes two New York Times information-design works, according to Fast Company: one about Notre Dame cathedral’s vulnerability to fire and another recreating Tulsa’s destroyed Greenwood neighborhood. These examples use graphics to explain events and places that cannot be represented by a single number. Fast Company reports that MoMA has collected information-design work since Antonelli’s 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, and that all but one work in Full Disclosure is in the museum’s collection.

What to look for in the exhibition’s visual choices

MoMA says the exhibition examines how people visualize information and how designers can shape understanding. Antonelli told Fast Company that information design can make public and intimate phenomena comprehensible to a wide audience. In the same interview, she urged visitors to pay closer attention to choices such as color and typeface and called for ‘More critical eyes.’ Her remarks point to a useful way through the show: read the subject of each work, then inspect the decisions that make one feature stand out while another recedes.

The examples provide different starting points for that close reading. Warming Stripes compresses many years into color; Dear Data gives everyday activity a visual form; Calculating Empires presents the artists’ interpretation of long histories; and Black Migration to the U.S. belongs to a project built around research and visual precedent. Each asks viewers to consider the relationship between the underlying information and the arrangement in front of them. The same questions can travel beyond the gallery to the charts and dashboards people encounter elsewhere.