NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art opened a new exhibition, Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, MoMA’s first devoted entirely to information design. On view in the Museum’s street-level gallery—which is free and accessible to the public—from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027, Full Disclosure features 30 works of digital and analog information design, including seven newly acquired works. This exhibition explores the many ways in which humans visualize information and how designers, operating in an increasingly complex digital world, can facilitate and shape our understanding. The show also seeks to recognize the fundamental role of information design, a medium that has evolved into a defining practice of the 20th and 21st centuries and a pillar of the Museum’s design collection. Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Director, Research and Development, Jules Bernstein, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, and Forrest Pelsue, 2025–26 Marron Research Consortium (MRC) Fellow.

“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 Antonelli. “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.”

While often thought to be a product of the digital age, information design has a rich analog history, from William Playfair’s introduction of the bar chart in 1786 and John Snow’s map of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1900 diagrams, describing African American communities’ progress and accomplishments. After the introduction of the computer, new graphic languages transformed data representation into one of the most fertile disciplines in the design realm. Featured works in this exhibition expand on the conventional diagrammatic styles of information design, including such approaches as infrastructural cartography, investigative visualization, infographic autobiography, and journalistic storytelling.

Among the new acquisitions highlighted in this exhibition is Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023), which exists both digitally and as a large-scale installation. The work describes the entanglement between technology and power since the invention of the Gutenberg press, tracing patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure as a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. Also on view for the first time at MoMA are the New York Times’s interactive reports “Why Notre Dame Was a Tinderbox” (2019) and "What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed" (2021). Acquired by the Museum in 2025, these works provide new perspectives on moments of tragedy and historical injustice through two representations that exemplify the highest level of data-driven visual journalism, blending immediacy and historical depth to create compelling narratives.

Another recent acquisition, “The Seizure of the Iuventa” (2018), demonstrates how design can transform complex spatial data into compelling testimony, challenging official narratives and revealing the political infrastructures that shape migration, borders, and human rights. Developed by Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography, Iuventa is a detailed reconstruction of the Italian government’s seizure of a humanitarian rescue vessel in the Mediterranean. Created in support of the legal defense of the ship’s crew, the project utilizes satellite imagery, maritime tracking data, 3D modeling, and eyewitness testimony to assemble a visual framework for understanding these events. By repurposing technologies of surveillance and control as instruments of transparency, the work expands the possibilities of information design beyond representation and into the realms of investigation, advocacy, accountability, and justice.

In Domestic Data Streamers’ Synthetic Memories (2022–ongoing), artificial intelligence is introduced as a tool to preserve unrecorded history. The project uses generative AI to re-create and register personal memories that are at risk of being lost, from elders with age-related memory impairment, refugees fleeing war or political persecution, or groups displaced by natural disasters. Where Synthetic Memories builds off subjective datasets, Two Sides of the Same Coin (2025) presents acutely scientific data, juxtaposing the largest human microbiome dataset ever assembled with an impact map of more than 12,000 years of human land use, literally as two sides of an expansive coin. The work illustrates deeply intertwined relationships—between data and humanity, visualization and understanding, and our biology and environment—to form an interactive portrait of how settlement and urbanization reshape not only the Earth, but the human body itself.

Today, as data saturates every domain of human life, information design has evolved into a distinct and critical design practice capable of both organizing information and interrogating the very infrastructures that produce it. Full Disclosure will allow visitors to use design as a lens through which they can evaluate and navigate today’s fragile ecosystem of truth and trust.