Giorgia Lupi Creates Data Visualizations for ‘The New York Times’
Artists and designers share their experiences from the past year on the anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown.
Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi was invited by The New York Times to participate in “7 Questions, 75 Artists, 1 Very Bad Year,” an exercise in which a diverse group of artists, designers, musicians, writers, performers and makers were asked a series of questions about their experiences over the past year. The feature marked the one-year anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown and ran in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday, March 14, 2021 print edition, as well as online.
Three of the data visualizations were featured in the print edition.
The visual artists in the group were asked to answer the questions with images of their own making. Giorgia responded to five of the queries with hand-drawn diagrams that function as simple data mountains plotted along a timeline of the year. They include:
What art have you turned to in this time?
What’s one thing you made this year?
Did you have any particularly bad ideas?
Did you find a friendship that sustained you artistically?
If you’d known that you’d be so isolated for so long, what would you have done differently?
The drawings utilize the principles of “data humanism”—using data to uncover human stories behind the numbers and statistics, and collecting data as a personal activity.
“Did you have any particularly bad ideas?”
“What’s one thing you made this year?”
“What art have you turned to in this time?”
The participants also included Amanda Gorman, Jenny Holzer, Phoebe Bridgers, Issa Rae, Aaron Dessner, Aaron Sorkin, Nico Muhly, Aidy Bryant, Na Kim, Jon Key, Trent Reznor and many, many more. Check out the complete feature here.
