Printing Black America Featured at MoMA
POSTED ON: October 1, 2026
Artist William Villalongo, associate professor in the School of Art, with urban planner Shraddha Ramani.
William Villalongo and Shraddha Ramani, Black Migration to the U.S. Portfolio 1: First Impressions, 2026. Screenprint with cut-and-pasted digital print (reproduction of a “Data Portrait” by W.E.B. Du Bois) from a series of thirty prints in six portfolios, 22 × 28 in. Printed by Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. © Villalongo Studio LLC.
William Villalongo and Shraddha Ramani, Occupations of Black Americans 1900–2021 (detail). Portfolio 3: Employment, 2026. Screenprint, digital print, and cut-and-pasted digital print (reproduction of a “Data Portrait” by W.E.B. Du Bois) from a series of thirty prints in six portfolios, 28 x22 in. Printed by Island Press, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. © Villalongo Studio LLC.
A collaboration between School of Art professor William Villalongo and urban planner Shraddha Ramani is featured in Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The exhibition, which opened on September 27, includes a selection of works from Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century, their five-year, “transhistorical” project to reinterpret and respond to the data visualizations innovated by luminary activist and educator W.E.B. Du Bois.
Du Bois—who spoke in The Cooper Union’s Great Hall on at least eight separate occasions between 1902 and 1945, including at the inaugural public meeting of the NAACP—developed groundbreaking methodologies of data collection and visual storytelling related to Black life and culture. Villalongo and Ramani extend these “data portraits,” which debuted at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, into the present, combining contemporary data analysis, archival research, and printmaking to consider new possibilities for Black life today.
Prior to being acquired by the MoMA, the full project of Printing Black America was presented at Print Center New York and at the Brooklyn Public Library, where a class of first-year Cooper art students visited the exhibition last spring. The 30 images comprising the project were created in collaboration with printmaking centers and scholars across the country.
Full Disclosure, which features six of Villalongo and Ramani’s works, is MoMA’s first exhibition devoted entirely to information design, exploring how visual forms shape our understanding of complex information. The exhibition is on view through June 13, 2027.
