Graphicstudio Project Acquired by MoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, and Many Others

By Mark Fredricks, Research Administrator, Graphicstudio

Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century is an expansive, collaborative, research-based print portfolio by artist William Villalongo and urbanist Shraddha Ramani that updates W.E.B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking data visualizations for the 1900 World’s Fair with contemporary data and perspectives. Museums and academic institutions across the country have acquired the portfolio, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Villalongo and Ramani worked directly with six publishers across the United States, each contributing five images to develop a portfolio of 30 images. The publishers include Graphicstudio, within the College of Design, Art & Performance at USF; Powerhouse Arts, Brooklyn; Island Press, Washington University, St. Louis; Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis; Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley; and Mullowney Printing Company, Portland, Oregon.

The questions, data sources, and research methodology of Printing Black America were developed in collaboration with Nell Painter, historian and advisor on the project, and the Center for Africana Digital Humanities Lab at Clark Atlanta University, the university that was Du Bois’s faculty home for nearly 25 years. Painter wrote about the importance of the project, noting that “the serpentine images of Printing Black America reveal the insufficiency of twentieth-century science to capture meanings of what we call ‘race,’ a concept, finally, that art envisions more satisfyingly. In the previous century Du Bois gave us drawings in vivid color. Now a range of visual processes encourage us to think–to see Blackness in all its glorious, even contradictory, variety.”
 
Printing Black America continues Du Bois’s original project and conveys both the structural challenges and dynamic participation of Black peoples in American social and economic life. As with Du Bois’s data portraits, both nationwide data sets and local studies informed the portfolio. For example, while in residence at Graphicstudio, Villalongo and Ramani worked with Dr. Antoinette Jackson, professor in the USF Department of Anthropology, founder and director of the Black Cemetery Network, and director of the USF Living Heritage Institute & Story Studio. That collaboration led to one of the prints in the portfolio, African American Burial Ground Project & Tropicana Field, which presents a visual excavation of the historical strata beneath Tropicana Field, including the Oaklawn, Evergreen, and Moffett cemeteries.

The portfolio has connected with audiences and institutions across the country; it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library and will be on view at the Los Angeles Public Library in February 2027. Printing Black America will be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, on view in the New York museum from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027. It is also touring as part of the group exhibition Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print, which was shown at Print Center New York and will be opening at the Portland Art Museum in 2027, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2028, and at two more venues to be confirmed by Art Bridges, the touring sponsor.

Du Bois’s data portraits from 1900 told the story of the social and economic realities of Black Americans on the global stage of the Paris World’s Fair. More than a century later, Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century demonstrates the power of art and research to illuminate complex histories and contemporary realities. Through its presence in major museum collections and public institutions, the project extends Du Bois’s legacy for new audiences and future generations.

See the complete set of 30 prints on the Graphicstudio website.