Dead center John Dewey.

Now consider Ms. Dewey.

Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened.

For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher.

A public, Dewey long ago observed, is constituted through discussion and debate.

In 2015, Dewey Hagborg was coming off the massive success of her 2012 project, Stranger Visions.

When asked about the peculiar timing of it all, Dewey Hagborg said that things happen for a reason.

It's gone through science as an inquiry, which was a big advance, and Dewey back at Chicago you learn by doing.

The 30 portraits were created by the artist Heather Dewey Hagborg from cheek swabs and hair clippings sent to her by Chelsea Manning.

In the past, I've had them on the wall but I wanted them to feel like a crowd, Dewey Hagborg said of the portraits.

And the wonderful thing about the new bookstore is, it's going to be shaped in a spiral that's organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly.

By including the 200 letters (or nucleotides, per the artist's sophisticated scientific lexicon), Dewey Hagborg hoped to illustrate how astoundingly similar, at least in biological makeup, we all are.

They were conducting an interview with Chelsea Manning while she was in prison and they wanted some kind of portrait to accompany that article, Dewey Hagborg explained at a press preview of the new exhibition.

What I'm hoping that people will take away from this is that our genome doesn't care about who we are, and how open genetic data is to interpretation, how subjective it is, said Dewey Hagborg, whose 2007 video work, Spurious Memories, is also on display.

It's the product of two years of correspondence between Dewey Hagborg, whose discipline combines her expertise in technology, computer science and art, and Manning, a trans woman and pioneering dissident whose sentence was commuted by Barack Obama when he had just three days left in office.

And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey decimal system on one continuous run no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries.

By algorithmically analyzing DNA extracted from Manning and using it to create 30 portraits of what someone with that genomic data might look like, Dewey Hagborg has created a trenchant, if somewhat cerebral, commentary on not only the malleability of DNA data the many ways it can be interpreted, and the inherent determinism of those interpretations but also identity.