William Villalongo & Shraddha Ramani

2025

William Villalongo (b. 1975, Hollywood, Florida) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. His figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture are concerned with representing the Black subject against notions of race and exploring metaphors of mythology and liberation. His curatorial projects – American Beauty at Susan Inglett Gallery in 2013 and Black Pulp! touring nationally between 2016-2018 – explore the intersections of politics, history and art. Villalongo is the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor’s Grant, and was the 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Art. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Princeton University Art Museum and El Museo del Barrio. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The artist is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art.

Shraddha Ramani (b. Bangalore, India) is an urbanist and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses data visualization and mapmaking as tools to make cities more resilient and equitable. Her work is centered around democratizing data to better equip communities to make informed decisions about their futures. She worked in multiple capacities in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department at New York City Emergency Management, finishing as the Director of the GIS Data Center. In this role she directed a team to make data-driven decisions for emergency planning, response, recovery, and mitigation. In earlier roles she developed online applications to help the public visualize and understand natural hazard risks in their communities. Previously, she worked on the development of the Future City Lab exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Ramani’s work is heavily informed by her own immigrant experience. She has participated in planning projects in India and Brazil and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. She has a Master’s degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University, and a BA in Environmental Studies from Oberlin College.

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

In 1900 W.E.B. Du Bois organized a series of data visualizations on the progress of Black peoples after Emancipation to be displayed as part of The American Negro Exhibit in the 1900 Paris
Exposition World’s Fair. The American Negro Exhibit worked to upend the conceit of Western superiority and the “progress” of industrialization by using the burgeoning field of data visualization to render the dynamic participation of Black peoples in American social and economic life, as well as in the global fields of science, literature, and art. Du Bois’s “data portraits,” as he called them, were hand drawn visualizations based on data collected by surveys, workshops and the limited national data available on Black lives in the U.S. census.

Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century uses the original data portraits created for the American Negro Exhibit as a springboard for the critical possibilities found at the intersection of art and social science to illuminate portraits of Black life in the 21st century. Artist William Villalongo and urbanist Shraddha Ramani have updated the project of Du Bois and his team for the contemporary moment by employing a range of printmaking techniques to create new “data portraits” that draw on current data, as well as ongoing projects by Black scholars, social scientist and activists. Each of the sixty-five original Du Bois visualizations have been discussed with historian Nell I. Painter, urbanist Shraddha Ramani and in workshops at Clark Atlanta University’s Center for Africana Digital Humanities. These discussions considered the original Du Bois inquiries, their meaning in the 21st century and the complexities the contemporary moment bring to these questions.

Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century is comprised of thirty prints, broken down into thematic sets of six, published by presses across the United States. The portfolios draw on data about Black life from official records such as the 2020 U.S. Census as well as local oral testimonies and archives. Where necessary, contextual text and legends or thumbnail images of the original Du Bois visualizations have been included. The titles appear in a text bubble at the top of the page. Data sources are cited.

Each of the six portfolios include a hard cover, fabric folio, title page, forward by Nell Irvin Painter, signed artist statement and the poem Madam and the Census Man by Langston Hughes. All prints and inserts are 28” X 22”.

Portfolio 1 – First Impressions (Graphicstudio, University of South Florida, Tampa)
Portfolio 2 – Populations (Powerhouse Arts, Brooklyn, New York)
Portfolio 3 – Employment (Island Press, Washington University, St. Louis)
Portfolio 4 – Ownership (Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Portfolio 5 – Education (Mullowney Printing Company, Portland, Oregon)
Portfolio 6 – Communities (Paulson Fontaine Press, Berkeley, California)

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