{"id":161494,"date":"2026-03-12T16:10:40","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T16:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/161494\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T16:10:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T16:10:40","slug":"printing-black-america-examines-modern-society-through-a-historic-lens-at-the-brooklyn-public-library-brooklyn-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/161494\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Printing Black America\u2019 examines modern society through a historic lens at the Brooklyn Public Library \u2022 Brooklyn Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"printing\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The new exhibit \u201cPrinting Black America: Du Bois\u2019s Data Portraits in the 21st Century\u201d at the Brooklyn Public Library re-imagines an old project with modern information. <\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Gregg Richards\/Brooklyn Public Library<\/p>\n

Beautiful by design and powerful in content, W.E.B Du Bois\u2019s \u201cData Portraits\u201d offer a representation of Black America existing in the context of a United States that codified \u201cseparate but equal\u201d in Plessy v. Ferguson not long before the work was shown at the 1900 World Fair.<\/p>\n

Building on Du Bois\u2019s legacy, over 125 years later, urbanist Shraddha Ramani and Brooklyn-based visual artist William Villalongo recontextualize and reimagine Du Bois\u2019s work in the Brooklyn Public Library\u2019s new exhibition, \u201cPrinting Black America: Du Bois\u2019s Data Portraits in the 21st Century.<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to both highlight Du Bois\u2019s work but talk about it in the context of a living archive,\u201d Villalongo said. \u201cThe questions and inquiries that Du Bois brought up about Black life in America are still very much relevant and evolving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"creatorsArtist William Villalongo (center) and urbanist Shraddha Ramani (left) created \u201cPrinting Black America,\u201d with help from scholars in the field. Photo courtesy of Gregg Richards\/Brooklyn Public Library <\/p>\n

Their work \u2014 a series of print portfolios inspired by Du Bois\u2019 original project<\/a> \u2014 will be exhibited at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library until May 31. Continuing Du Bois\u2019 collaborative approach, the prints were created in partnership with scholars, sociologists and innovative Black thinkers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the original \u201cExhibit of American Negroes,\u201d Du Bois, who lived in Brooklyn from 1951 to 1961, hand-drew infographics based on data collected in handwritten surveys and limited national data on Black lives in the U.S. census.<\/p>\n

Relying on Du Bois\u2019s trenchant data analysis, the original work visualized the \u201ccolor line,\u201d delineating where rapid post-slavery advancements in the socio-economic realities of Black Americans took the form of progress concerning literacy rates, occupational shifts and property ownership.<\/p>\n

\"duboisTwo of DuBois\u2019 original \u201cData Portraits\u201d from the 1900 World\u2019s Fair. Images via U.S. Library of Congress<\/p>\n

\u201cPrinting Black America\u201d presents that historical source material alongside contemporary works, using the same means of mechanical reproduction in image and print used in Du Bois\u2019s era, parsing the information into themes of First Impressions, Populations, Employment, Ownership, Education and Communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The intangibility of sinister post-Reconstruction doctrines begs the question: how does one make sense of institutional racism? For Shraddha and Villalongo, the answer emerges from the complexities of Du Bois\u2019s data, which forms the basis of this art.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to bring into the visuals a critique of how data is collected and shown,\u201d Ramani said. \u201cThe ambiguity is contained there, how it divides people into classes in questionable ways that not everyone can recognize and see themselves in the data.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"printingTwo pieces from \u201cPrinting Black America\u201d use DuBois\u2019 approach to explore modern data. Images courtesy of Brooklyn Public Library<\/p>\n

While Du Bois, as the leading academic, was most closely associated with the Paris World\u2019s Fair in 1900, other sociologists also showed work at the tiny booth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe data visualizations were only one part of it, and that\u2019s the piece that we see the most today,\u201d Ramani said. \u201cBut, it was shown in the context of books and patents and other work that was produced by Black people at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cora Fisher, the curator of visual art at the Brooklyn Public Library<\/a>, said that to make the material more digestible for viewers, Ramani and Villalongo wanted to spread the exhibition across the library. As a result, the library commissioned essays by professors, historians, researchers and other artists, and the reframed work was integrated across several intersecting reference sections.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that we\u2019ve done in this exhibition is invite a panoply of other voices to pose questions in short interpretive essays,\u201d Fisher said.<\/p>\n

\"peopleThe exhibit includes both prints and short interpretive essays. Photo courtesy of Gregg Richards\/Brooklyn Public Library<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving the work be curated into the subjects or the research and study areas at the library, really makes the thematics that we came up with more complex,\u201d Villalongo said. \u201cIt has also given us an opportunity to curate book selections that are paired with the larger context of the Negro exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like its source, \u201cPrinting Black America\u201d gives visibility to the shapes of collective, creative resistance, and to Black joy, dignity and continued self-determination.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope viewers will be introduced to the figure of Du Bois and to the notion of data visualization as a tool for communities to define themselves on their own terms,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cAnd, for folks to learn about that and think about how technology and art relate to their own lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new exhibit \u201cPrinting Black America: Du Bois\u2019s Data Portraits in the 21st Century\u201d at the Brooklyn Public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,2571,98,100,99,14749,66628,66629,4442,12381,881,19709,9,24,12,370,63,66630,66631,3863,66632,66633,904,66634,66635,66636],"class_list":{"0":"post-161494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts-and-entertainment","10":"tag-brooklyn","11":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","12":"tag-brooklyn-news","13":"tag-brooklyn-public-library","14":"tag-cora-fisher","15":"tag-data-portraits","16":"tag-exhibit","17":"tag-exhibition","18":"tag-history","19":"tag-library","20":"tag-new-york","21":"tag-new-york-city","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-newsletter","24":"tag-nyc","25":"tag-printing-black-america","26":"tag-printing-black-america-du-boiss-data-portraits-in-the-21st-century","27":"tag-racism","28":"tag-reconstruction","29":"tag-shradda-ramani","30":"tag-things-to-do","31":"tag-w-e-b-du-bois","32":"tag-william-villalongo","33":"tag-worlds-far"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}