Printing Black America: Du Bois's Data Portraits in the 21st Century

Printing Black America: Du Bois's Data Portraits in the 21st Century is on view at Highpoint Center for Printmaking through November 14, 2026. It's a collaboration between artist William Villalongo and urbanist Shraddha Ramani, and the show brings together their complete Printing Black America portfolio: 30 prints spread across six thematic portfolios—First Impressions, Populations, Employment, Ownership, Education, and Communities—each in an edition of 20.

The work is a reimagining of the infographics W.E.B. Du Bois created for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Back then, Du Bois used data visualization to push back against Western claims that industrial progress was inevitable and to document Black participation in American social, economic, scientific, and artistic life. Villalongo and Ramani update those portraits with contemporary data and the work of Black scholars, social scientists, and activists. There's a geographical reach to the making of it, too: each of the six portfolios was printed at a different studio across the United States—Minneapolis, Saint Louis, New York, Berkeley, Portland, and Tampa. The full set includes a foreword by Nell Irvin Painter and a poem by Langston Hughes.

Villalongo was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and teaches at The Cooper Union; Ramani is a researcher and former director of the GIS Data Center at New York City Emergency Management. Their backgrounds—one in art and education, the other in urban data—sit right at the center of what this project does: turning numbers into images and images back into a conversation about who gets counted and how. If you're into the intersection of art, data, and Black history, this is one to see. You can find the show at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, 912 West Lake Street in Minneapolis, on view through November 14.