Nona Faustine, a photographer who used her work to highlight the perseverance of Black women, has died at 48. The Brooklyn Museum, which mounted an exhibition of the artist last year, confirmed her passing on social media. A cause of death was not specified.
ARTnews has reached out to Higher Pictures, Faustine’s New York gallery.
In ways both provocative and beautiful, Faustine’s photography explored conditions afflicting Black women across time. She frequently photographed herself in ways that considered how her body acted as a record of histories of exploitation and empowerment.
“The true lives of Black women in the United States, if not in the world, are not seen,” she told the photographer Carla J. Williams last year in BOMB magazine. “I wanted to show our lives and who we are. We are very special. Not just because of our suffering but because of our beauty and strength. The reinvention and the creativity that oozes out. The bravery.”
Her most famous series, “White Shoes,” involved visiting sites in New York that had ties to histories of enslavement. In some images from the series, she pictured herself in the nude, wearing just a pair of white pumps, in places such as the intersection at 74 Wall Street, where enslaved people were once auctioned.
To create that picture, she had to enlist friends to ensure police officers would not notice the naked artist. “Putting myself out there in the middle of the intersection at Wall Street with ongoing traffic was a huge risk,” she told Musée, recalling that it was often below freezing when she disrobed.
Faustine began the “White Shoes” series in 2012 and was not yet finished with it by the time it was surveyed at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024, in what was billed as her first-ever institutional show. She was inspired to start it after reading up on Sarah Baartman, a South African Khoikhoi woman who was ogled by Westerners during the 19th century as a freak show attraction in Europe.
In that context, the shoes are rich with symbolism. “They represent what Black women have been denied publicly and privately,” wrote Pamela Sneed in 4Columns last year. “Because of racism, misogyny, and more, what is often denied is agency. Faustine, in control of the camera and the lens, offers reclamation.”
One of the more recent images from the series, Benevolent spirits, tracing steps free bare feet from this world to the other (2021), features just the pumps themselves, without Faustine present. Arranged around the shoes are shells and bits of sea glass. “We are compelled to recall the Black women who have perished from this earth,” wrote Alana Pockros in the New York Times. “It’s a lasting image for us to take away, so that we never, ever forget what transpired in our very own city.”
Nona Faustine was born in 1977 in Brooklyn, New York, and was raised in Crown Heights. Photography was all around her. She credited her father and uncle, both of whom were photography enthusiasts, with stoking an interest in the medium, and recalled spending time with her family’s photo album.
She studied photography at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1997. Initially, she had plans to become a landscape photographer and pursued her passion as an undergraduate, toting around her field camera with her when she visited New York’s parks. But a considerable change had taken place by the time she went back to school in 2011, this time at the International Center of Photography at Bard College.
She had begun to focus on people: “Mitochondria,” a series begun in 2008, was a tribute to women in her family, with images of her mother, her sister, and her daughter. “I wanted to give my daughter the same gift my father gave me: a visual diary,” she told Lens, the New York Times’s photography blog. “As a single mother, I wanted her to see how much she was loved.”
Black women continued to be the subject of her work. In Say Her Name (2016), Faustine photographed herself lying down in her family’s Flatbush apartment, posed as though she were deceased. It was a tribute to Sandra Bland, who died in police custody after being arrested by a state trooper in 2015.
Other works interrogated American history more broadly. One body of photographs feature distinctly American sites—the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and others—that are pictured behind bars. Doing so leaves these sites partially hidden from public view because Faustine was exploring “how history is turned around,” as she once said. “What is left out, what is included, what are the lies. And, who gets celebrated.”
Faustine had recently completed a fellowship with the American Academy in Rome. In an interview with the American Academy in Rome, she said she had spent her time in Italy “exploring the African presence in ancient Rome through landscapes and self-portraits.” Her daughter, Queen, had made the trip to Italy with her.
“It is a wonder to see all of present-day Rome—contemporary, modern, and ancient—peeking underneath the surface everywhere,” she said. “What it could have been and who was there.”
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