The Museum of Modern Art’s “Full Disclosure” Finds Beauty in Data
Charts, maps, journalism, and AI come together in a timely look at who gets to shape the way we see data
The first MoMA exhibition devoted entirely to information design, titled “Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design,” will bring together around 30 digital and analog works, including six recent additions to the collection, in the museum’s street-level gallery. Viewers will learn how, long before data streams flowed into everyday life, designers were finding ways to make complicated information visible. The show looks at over 200 years of what happens when designers use science to make sense of problems coming from migration, history, journalism, and individual memory.
To start at the beginning, visitors will see how William Playfair introduced the bar chart in 1786, physician John Snow plotted cases from London’s 1854 cholera outbreak on a map, and W. E. B. Du Bois created diagrams describing the progress and accomplishments of African American communities in 1900. With the era of the computer, the field has became vastly more complicated. So have questions of trust.
“As data has become a defining feature of contemporary life, its visualization has evolved into one of the most consequential design fields of our time,” said MoMA Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli, adding, “The objectivity of data, in particular, is increasingly under scrutiny, as public confidence in institutions and in the intelligence they produce is decreasing. In a networked, data-driven society, information designers are reporters and translators, offering us not absolute truths but, rather, clearly sourced, specific, and explanatory visual takes that leave room for interpretation––even imagination. As a practice, information design allows us to dig deep into our reality, rendering complex phenomena and global infrastructures legible while also unveiling and clarifying systems of power.”
One work takes an exceptionally long view. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 examines connections between technology and power beginning with the Gutenberg press. Elsewhere, the scale becomes personal. Domestic Data Streamers’ ongoing Synthetic Memories employs generative AI to recreate and record memories that might otherwise disappear. Participants have included older people experiencing age-related memory impairment and those fleeing war, persecution, and natural disasters.
Two very different examples come from The New York Times. The interactive reports “Why Notre Dame Was a Tinderbox” and “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed” will be on view. The former uses visual reporting to examine the circumstances surrounding the devastating Notre Dame fire, while the latter addresses destruction wrought during the Tulsa Race Massacre. These examples show how data-driven visual journalism can bring together immediate storytelling and historical research.
“Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027.