Artist William Villalongo and urbanist Shraddha Ramani talk with scholar and curator Tiffany Barber about their collaborative portfolio Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century in which the duo reimagines W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic 1900 data visualizations that explained institutionalized racism to the world. These transformed visualizations recast Du Bois's distillations and interrogate contemporary Black life. The production of the prints was shared across six print publishers, including Powerhouse Arts Printshop.

Bios:
William Villalongo was born in 1975. He 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 exploring metaphors of mythology and liberation. His curatorial projects include 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 & Sculptors Grant. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum In Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, 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. Villalongo is the 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Art.
 

Shraddha Ramani 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 currently works at the NYC Department of Transportation on efforts to improve equity and accessibility. Previously she was Director of the GIS Data Center at New York City Emergency Management, where she led 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. Earlier, she worked on the development of the Future City Lab exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Shraddha Ramani is from Bangalore, India and her 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.

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize. Before joining the Department of Art History at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She is also an alumna of the School of Criticism and Theory (’14) at Cornell University.