Data Portraits, after Du Bois

Portraits of Black Americans were an important part of W.E.B. Du Bois's Exhibit of the American Negro at the 1900 Paris World's Fair. Alongside artifacts of Black American progress, Du Bois showed data art: hand-drawn charts derived from his statistically advanced sociological studies, The Georgia Negro and The American Negro.

Data Portraits amplifies the humanization of those 1900 compilations by pairing the data visualizations directly with the portraits of Black Americans that also appeared in the Paris exhibit. Viewers are superimposed in real time as abstract digital figures, colored red, green, and gold: the colors of Black liberation.