Exhibition | Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair

Deconstructing Power: W. E. B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair is on view at Cooper Hewitt from December 9, 2022 through May 29, 2023.

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This exhibition highlights the groundbreaking series of data visualizations W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University made for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. For the first time, it will bring them into dialogue with the manufacturers and decorative arts also on display, calling attention to how the progressive image of the fair was inequitable, and concealed the power mechanisms of nationalism and imperialism that drove this spectacle of progress.

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Cream colored book cover with black trim. Center of cover dominated by spiraling infographic with red, yellow, pink and purple lines. Above the spiral, three alternating lines of centered text in black, red, and black contain the title and subtitle ”the color line at the turn of the century,” which is in all caps. Editors names appear in black below the spiral.

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America

A black book cover featuring a b&w photo of a balding man with a goatee, wearing a suit. Large text overlaid at center reads "DuBois." Below a red, white, and blue stripe, small text reads "Black Reconstruction," "An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880"

W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction

Large book cover with an image of an antique map of a volcano with multicolored fields flowing towards the edges. Title in black sans serif font near bottom right

History of Information Graphics

Orange book cover featuring a black and white image of a raised fist; white text, rotated 90 degrees, overlaid, reads "STRIKETHROUGH"

Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest