MoMA will open Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design on September 27, running through June 13, 2027 — the museum’s first exhibition devoted entirely to information design as its own discipline, rather than as a supporting element inside a broader design or media-art show.
Thirty works, six new to the collection
The show gathers 30 works spanning digital and analog media, including six newly acquired pieces, in MoMA’s street-level gallery — free and open without a ticketed-exhibition barrier, a deliberate accessibility choice for a show about a discipline whose entire purpose is making complex information legible to a general audience. The roster includes Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (whose Anatomy of an AI System has become one of the most widely cited visualizations of what an AI system actually consists of), Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (Google’s longtime data-visualization research pairing), Giorgia Lupi (a leading figure in “data humanism,” the practice of making statistical visualization emotionally legible rather than purely functional), Domestic Data Streamers, Laura Kurgan, Ed Hawkins (creator of the widely-recognized climate-change “warming stripes” visualization), and Forensic Architecture (whose investigative spatial-analysis work has been used in human-rights litigation).
Why “information design” as its own category is the actual news
MoMA has held information design pieces before — Ed Hawkins’ warming stripes and Forensic Architecture’s investigative reconstructions are exactly the kind of work that’s shown up as illustrative material inside broader design or data-journalism-adjacent exhibitions for years. What’s new here is the museum treating the discipline itself as worthy of a dedicated show, framed explicitly as “a defining practice of the 20th and 21st centuries.” That’s a specific curatorial claim: that the methods of turning data into legible visual form — not just individual striking examples of it — have matured into a design tradition with its own history, techniques, and canon, comparable to how MoMA treats typography or industrial design as standing disciplines.
The curatorial team
The show comes from Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s Senior Curator of Architecture and Design and one of the most influential design curators working today, alongside curatorial assistant Jules Bernstein and Forrest Pelsue of the museum’s Marron Research Consortium fellowship — a team with deep institutional history in treating design as a lens on contemporary life rather than a purely aesthetic category.
Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design runs September 27, 2026 – June 13, 2027 at MoMA, New York.