New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Artspace hosts data portraits by W.E.B. Du Bois and others
Anew set of exhibits will debut at Artspace in New Haven this weekend, including digital prints of data portraits from W.E.B. Du Bois.
The exhibit is called “W.E.B. Du Bois, Georgia, and His Data Portraits,” and it showcases data visualizations of socioeconomic conditions facing Black Americans in the early 1900s.
Lisa Dent, executive director for Artspace, said there were many reasons to showcase Du Bois’s work right now, and that numerous people have already reached out to her expressing excitement for the project. She’s gotten emails and calls from graphic design educators, economists, data specialists and artists who all find the exhibit relevant to their interests.
“[This exhibit] does what I was hoping [it would do], which is to help people understand the way in which visual artists are able to help us create meaning out of the information that we have in the world,” Dent said. “So much of what we experience has been presented to us by the work of people with strong visual literacy, and that visual literacy can really take us to amazing places if we pay attention.”
Artspace will be interviewing Karen DuBois-Walton of New Haven for the exhibit’s accompanying podcast, “Outlines of Color,” which will premiere Friday on the Artspace website.
The two accompanying exhibits opening this weekend include works by Theaster Gates and Dana Karwas.
Gates’s work is “in dialogue with Du Bois’s visualizations... Reimagining the statistical data as abstract color fields and geometric motifs, these homages transform the archival, lending a poetic form and ushering the data’s impact into another sensory realm,” according to a news release.
Karwas’s work, “In A Heartbeat,” is inspired by Du Bois’s short fictional story “The Princess Steel.” The sculptures will “explore how small bits of data might have massive consequences—or not,” according to the same release.
“W.E.B. Du Bois, Georgia, and His Data Portraits” and “Theaster Gates” will run through June 26. “In a Heartbeat” will be on display through May 22.