Subheadline:
MoMA’s first exhibition devoted entirely to information design examines how data becomes visual language—and how designers shape what we understand about an increasingly complex world.
Discover Hook:
We live surrounded by data, but data does not automatically become knowledge. At The Museum of Modern Art, Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design asks what happens in the crucial space between the information we collect and the stories we ultimately see.
From climate change and migration to personal routines, digital systems, and hidden structures of power, the exhibition places information design at the center of contemporary visual culture.
Opening September 27, 2026, Full Disclosure brings together 30 digital and analog works in what MoMA describes as its first exhibition devoted entirely to information design. On view through June 13, 2027, the exhibition occupies MoMA’s street-level gallery, which is free and accessible to the public.
When Data Becomes Design
Information is everywhere: clicks, temperatures, movements, transactions, medical measurements, borders, communications and countless other traces of contemporary life.
But information alone is not necessarily understandable.
Full Disclosure begins with that distinction. MoMA describes data as something that must be translated through design before it can become useful knowledge. Charts, maps, diagrams, interfaces, timelines, images and computational visualizations therefore do more than make information attractive—they influence how viewers encounter and interpret it.
That makes information design particularly relevant in an era when algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly mediate everyday experience.
The exhibition considers how designers can reveal systems that are otherwise difficult to see, while also asking viewers to examine the choices behind those representations.
From Ancient Maps to Machine Intelligence
The history of visualizing information predates computers by thousands of years. Maps, diagrams, cosmological charts and other forms of abstraction have long provided humans with ways to organize complex realities.
What has changed dramatically is the scale and speed of contemporary information.
Algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence have expanded visualization beyond conventional charts and graphs. Contemporary information designers can now construct dynamic networks, animated narratives and computational environments capable of representing enormous quantities of data.
MoMA positions this transformation within a broader question of trust.
When institutions, platforms and systems increasingly depend on data, the way information is selected, organized and displayed can affect how audiences understand reality. The exhibition therefore treats design decisions and sources as fundamental components of the information itself.
Making Invisible Systems Visible
The 30 works presented in Full Disclosure demonstrate different approaches to turning complex information into visual experience.
Among them is Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires, a large-scale visual investigation into the intertwined histories of computation, technology, power and social organization. MoMA identifies the work as one of the exhibition’s featured pieces and as part of its collection.
Another important work is Ed Hawkins’s Warming Stripes, an ongoing data visualization representing global temperature changes through a sequence of colored stripes. MoMA’s accompanying audio describes the work as showing annual temperature change from 1850 onward, allowing a long-term climate pattern to be perceived as a simple visual sequence.
The exhibition also includes Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Dear Data, a project that transforms everyday personal observations into hand-created visualizations. MoMA lists Dear Data: Week 14 (Abstract Productivity / A Week of Schedules) among the works in the exhibition.
Together, such works demonstrate that information visualization does not have to be purely technical. It can be intimate, observational, political, scientific or poetic.
Personal Data, Collective Histories
One of the exhibition’s broader themes is the relationship between individual experience and larger systems.
Domestic Data Streamers’ Synthetic Memories, for example, appears in the exhibition’s selection of digital information projects. MoMA also presents work concerned with poverty, migration, climate, geography and historical representation.
Chow and Lin’s The Poverty Line examines food and economic conditions through visual representation, while William Villalongo and Shraddha Ramani’s Black Migration to the U.S. draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s pioneering tradition of using data portraits to represent Black life and migration.
These works broaden the definition of information design.
The medium is not simply about making statistics easier to read. It can also become a method for preserving memory, documenting inequality, questioning official narratives and giving visual form to experiences that might otherwise remain abstract.
Investigating Power Through Information
The exhibition also enters territory where visualization becomes investigative practice.
MoMA includes Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography’s Seizure of the Iuventa, connecting information design with the reconstruction and analysis of real-world events.
This points toward an increasingly important role for designers: using data not only to explain systems but also to interrogate them.
Maps can reveal patterns. Timelines can expose sequences. Spatial models can reconstruct events. Networks can reveal relationships.
The designer consequently becomes something more than a visual stylist. The act of choosing what to display, what to connect and what to leave outside the frame can become an investigative process.
The Politics of Seeing
The title Full Disclosure carries an important tension.
No visualization can show everything.
Every map has boundaries. Every diagram selects information. Every interface establishes priorities. Every dataset depends on decisions about what is collected, how it is classified and how it is presented.
MoMA’s exhibition consequently invites viewers to look not only at what a visualization tells them, but also at how it tells them.
That distinction becomes especially significant as artificial intelligence and automated systems increasingly generate, classify and interpret information.
The question is no longer simply whether information is available. It is also who structures it, which assumptions are embedded within it, and how visual form influences human interpretation.
A New Chapter for Information Design at MoMA
Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design marks a significant institutional statement by MoMA: information design is not merely a supporting tool for other disciplines but a major field of contemporary design in its own right.
The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and Director of Research and Development; Jules Bernstein, Curatorial Assistant; and Forrest Pelsue, 2025–26 Marron Research Consortium Fellow.
The exhibition also includes six newly acquired works, further expanding MoMA’s information-design holdings.
For New York audiences, the timing is particularly resonant. The city is simultaneously a center of finance, media, technology, advertising, architecture, scientific research and cultural production—all fields in which information must constantly be translated into forms people can navigate.
Full Disclosure brings that invisible process into the gallery.
Beyond the Chart
Perhaps the most compelling idea behind Full Disclosure is that information design sits between fact and perception.
A dataset may be numerical, but the moment it becomes an image, map, diagram or interactive system, it enters the realm of visual culture.
That makes the exhibition relevant not only to designers and technologists, but also to artists, journalists, researchers, architects and anyone navigating a world increasingly shaped by data.
At MoMA, information is no longer simply something to be read.
It becomes something to look at, question and interpret.
Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design is on view at The Museum of Modern Art from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027, in the museum’s street-level gallery.
