Nona Faustine’s self-portraits are politically incisive, historically grounded, and spiritually transcendent. Placing her own abundant and carefully posed body at the center of locales haunted by history, she stages embodied interventions. Her White Shoes series on display at the Brooklyn Museum, in toto for the first time, demands an extensive reckoning with the histories and afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and genocidal violence against Black and Indigenous peoples in what we now call New York.
In “Black Indian, Andrew Williams Home Site, Seneca Village, Central Park, NYC” (2021), Faustine lounges in a sun hat and white dress while reading the book Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (1986) by historian William Loren Katz, which narrates histories of Black-Indigenous encounters and exchanges in the United States. Andrew Williams was the first African American to purchase land in Seneca Village, where Black New Yorkers lived in Manhattan for decades before the city demolished it in 1857. Elsewhere, Faustine stands topless in a flowing white cotton skirt holding a sign that reads “AR’N’T I A WOMAN” — a tribute to abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, who exclaimed those words in a monumental anti-slavery speech to an 1851 women’s rights convention in Ohio and lived at 74 Canal Street, where the photograph was taken.
The simple title White Shoes refers to the pair of “Church Lady” shoes that Faustine purchased in Brooklyn. The lily-white high heels conjure both implicit and explicit notions of femininity, Whiteness, and class aspiration embedded into formal attire. The white shoes appear in different photographs — paired with a tiara and white gloves, rooted firmly on concrete steps leading to New York City’s Supreme Court, on a soapbox/auction block on Wall Street, against a rock formation in the water off of Brooklyn’s Atlantic coast. “Venus of Vlacke Bos” (2012) joins a history of self-portraits experimenting with Black femininity as a matter of beauty and charm, but nonetheless marked by histories of subjugation and exploitation, as was the case for the “hottentot Venus,” Saartjie Baartman.
In other photographs, Faustine’s glowing naked body stands out extraordinarily against the dull concrete facade of the courthouse, where imperialist state power has been legislated across many generations. A craggy Brooklyn waterfront is a stark contrast. The image of Faustine laying against the rocks as if a shipwreck victim is amplified by the harrowing title: “Like a Pregnant Corpse the Ship Expelled Her into the Patriarchy, Atlantic Coast, Brooklyn, NY” (2012). Trafficked Africans were at times thrown overboard for insurance purposes, as in the Zong Massacre of 1781, while historical evidence shows that some captives chose to jump to their deaths to avoid being enslaved, perhaps an even more gruesome fate. Pregnancy points to the gendered exploitation of enslaved women and the notion that the social death and torturous journeys of the Middle Passage have in part birthed African Americanness itself.
Another work grappling with reproduction and Black womanhood is “From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth, Wall Street, NYC” (2013), in which the artist stands naked on a wooden block at the center of Wall Street. Her body is on full display for passersby in the busy area; her manacled hands and apparent vulnerability allude to the violent choreography of the auction block. Enslaved people were auctioned at 76 Wall Street from 1711 to 1762; Faustine summons this oft-ignored history by positioning her own flesh and person, as a descendant of enslaved African and Indigenous peoples, at the site of irreparable harm.
What is most shocking about this photograph is not her nudity or fleshy embodiment, but rather the frightening revelation that history lives on whether or not it is properly accounted for. The average New Yorker is likely unaware of the slave past in this cosmopolitan city, as we are taught that such trafficking in human flesh was just the business of the US South. The urban infrastructure conceals such dark pasts that are perhaps more noticeable in the expanses of Southern plantations. Faustine’s body marks the spot and transmits the essential message that has been too long erased and ignored: The wealth of the urban North, New York included, was forged from slavery. From the wombs of the enslaved birthed the humans-turned-commodities that built the ever-increasing wealth of the elite. Without the plight of enslaved Black women in New York, there is no Wall Street. The truth the photograph tells is unsettling because it persists today: Faustine’s guerilla-style self-portraiture carries specific risks as she is a plus-size Black woman whose body is vulnerable to the exploitation and hyper-sexualization that has continued since slavery.
It is profound to witness the Brooklyn-related photographs and histories in the Brooklyn Museum itself. “Say Her Name” (2016), photographed in the Flatbush apartment where Faustine’s family lives, shows the artist laid out as if she’s the deceased at a funeral, her mother sitting besides her. Faustine created the work to honor Sandra Bland, who died in police custody in 2015, and it does so poignantly by attending to the grief of Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed Veal; Veal has advocated for victims and survivors of police violence since her daughter’s untimely death. Encouraging further meditation on loss, “She Gave Them Everything They Asked and Still They Asked for More, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, NY” (2015) was photographed right next door to the museum. Faustine poses on the ground amid dense palm bushes, wearing a mask that evokes the art of global Black masquerade.
At each site, Faustine is not just critiquing institutions but honoring ancestors. For “Protection, African Burial Ground Monument, NYC” (2021), the artist, cloaked in shimmering gold fabric, kneels on the ground with reverence, seemingly in deep prayer for the thousands of free and enslaved ancestors buried there. Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, which are popular among African Americans engaging with West African history and culture, decorate the surrounding monument, emboldening the work’s spiritual themes. Faustine is there to protect and honor.
The white shoes are sacred in themselves. In “Benevolent Spirits, Tracing Steps Free Bare Feet from This World to the Other” (2021) the heels stand alone, surrounded by shells that evoke West African and Black diasporic divination practices. These shoes have carried Faustine through places and worlds — she seems to be traversing the borders between the realm of the ancestors and that of the living. At the same time, there is a profane feeling of emptiness in seeing the shoes without Faustine in them; the absence bespeaks the disappeared, missing, and murdered Black and Indigenous women who the photograph might memorialize. Faustine’s photographs invite us to confront the histories and embrace the ancestors for whom looking away was never an option. Each self-portrait is a meditation on refusing to forget and recognizing that which has been left unacknowledged in New York’s past.
Nona Faustine: White Shoes continues at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights, Brooklyn) through July 7. The exhibition was organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, with Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
