Shraddha Ramani, William Villalongo
Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century
Printing Black America: Du Bois’ Data Portraits in the 21st Century is a collaborative print portfolio that uses W.E.B. Du Bois’ original data portraits as a springboard for the critical possibilities found at the intersection of art and social science to render portraits of Black life in the 21st century. Villalongo and Ramani have created a new visual archive of data portraits across the U.S., using a range of printmaking techniques and contemporary data visualization methods in collaboration with Island Press and five other publishing print shops: GraphicStudio, Powerhouse Arts, Highpoint Editions, Mullowney Printing Company, and Paulson Fontaine Press.
See the full Printing Black America portfolio of 30 images HERE. Download edition and sales information below.
Island Press’ collaboration with Villalongo and Ramini is a portfolio of five prints entitled Employment, one of the six portfolios that are part of this monumental collaboration. The project in its entirety debuted in the exhibition Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print at Print Center New York. The exhibition, curated by Tiffany E. Barber, is on view in New York from September 18-December 13, 2025. An accompanying catalog is forthcoming and the exhibition will tour over the next two years. Pre-order exhibition catalog HERE.
William Villalongo and Shraddha Ramani
“EMPLOYMENT”
Portfolio 3 in Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century
Island Press, St Louis
In EMPLOYMENT, one of six portfolios in Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century, artist William Villalongo and urbanist Shraddha Ramani chart the changing meanings of work in African American life since the nineteenth century. Each portfolio of Printing Black America consists of five prints and is introduced with a foreward by historian Nell Irvin Painter and a poem by Langston Hughes. Because the portfolios are printed and published by different print shops in the United States, each one reflects research drawn from each location. EMPLOYMENT puts Villalongo and Ramani’s ambitions on full display. Their view of Black America telescopes in space from the bird’s eye to the hyperlocal, and spans across time from the age of slavery to the present day.
Of the five prints in EMPLOYMENT, three are graphic representations of data drawn from current surveys of African American occupations, income and consumer expenditures, and the disparities among men and women across those statistical categories. Two are grounded in St. Louis, where Villalongo and Ramani researched the local history of slavery and racism during their residency at Island Press. “Sites of Wounding/Sites of Healing” Alternative Atlas: STL overlays sites of “violent injustice” (in red) and “liberatory memory-work” (in yellow) onto a blackened map of the city. Reclaimed Family Tree, a genealogy rendered as a tangled spiral of roots and branches, affirms the ethical and financial debt owed by St. Louis University to the living descendants of its enslaved workers.
Along with the other portfolios in Printing Black America, EMPLOYMENT reimagines and extends the infographics produced by W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Villalongo and Ramani’s Occupations of Black Americans, 1900-2021 is a direct continuation of Du Bois’s “Occupation of Georgia Negroes,” which is collaged on the bottom of the print. Whereas Du Bois and his students represented measures of workers in an array of job categories as a hand-drawn bar chart, Villalongo and Ramani represent the subsequent century of Black labor history as a rainbow of colors percolating upward to the present. In Du Bois’s chart, the red bar for “Agricultural Laborers” is so long that it turns backward as it meets the righthand margin; in Villalongo and Ramini’s cascade, farmers and farm laborers turn from blobs of blue to fine lines, giving way to growing columns of professionals, technicians, and clerical workers.
Printing Black America also continues Du Bois’s argument with sociology. Although Du Bois was among the leading sociologists of his day, he was impatient with his white colleagues who ignored his work and misused quantitative data to devalue Black life. Like Du Bois, Villalongo and Ramani use printmaking techniques to draw out the everyday textures and ironies that lay behind statistical data. In Average Annual Income and Expenditures, they depict the balance of average income versus consumption with “Thank You For Shopping!” black plastic grocery bags. And while Employment and Income Disparities Between Black Women & Men in the U.S. vividly demonstrates the persistence of gendered inequality, the dominating image is that of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, among the most powerful people in the country.
Despite its ambitious scope, there is much that Printing Black America leaves unrepresented about the histories of political economy and labor activism that have transformed the conditions and categories of Black employment in the United States over the past century. Villalongo and Ramani are nonetheless alive not only to the ironies of those histories but also to what Du Bois called the “Things themselves” that escape quantitative sociological analysis: the rough textures, the jarring rhythms, and the mysterious energies that make the experience of Black life “incalculable.”
Chris Dingwall
Assistant Professor of Design History
Washington University in St. Louis
Editions from this project
