For Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I was interested in experimenting with ranking data on a map of the United States. The resulting works on paper rank disparate pairs of data sets, state by state. Most of the data sets I chose to engage with have relevance to the foundational and unalienable rights of Americans named in the series title. These disparate data sets (e.g. Incarceration rates/Freedom rankings) were paired to explore whether there were connections between the topics. My aesthetic decisions in this series, such as palette, state color use and size of stencils, intentionally reference Jasper Johns’ iconic Map painting from 1961 (now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), an artwork I had been thinking about and making studies of. The Johns painting is recognized for transforming something as ubiquitous and mundane as a map of the U.S., and for using something that was perceived at the time as non-artistic—stencils —into a groundbreaking artwork. My series presents topical sets of ranked data while paying homage to the Johns painting.