Nona Faustine (1977–2025)
138March 30, 2025
Artist and photographer Nona Faustine, who made Black womanhood and the attendant topics of identity, history, and representation her subjects in works of stunning visual power, died in New York on March 20. She was forty-eight. Her death was announced by Brooklyn gallery Higher Pictures, which represented her; no cause was given. Photographing young mothers, her own family members, and herself, Faustine highlighted marginalized African American histories, the hidden trauma wrought by the transatlantic slave trade, and the exigencies of being born Black and female. She brought all these themes to bear at once in her visceral and widely acclaimed series “White Shoes” (2012–21), for which she photographed herself wearing little more than a pair of white high heels in New York City locations historically associated with the slave trade. Crucial to the work are the shattering traces of its making. “I tried to commune with the forces of power and the spirits that I was sure existed, as I stood there naked in shackles in white pumps on a block of wood on Water St.,” wrote Faustine ina 2021 text documenting the series. “I watched as the people drove past me in their cars as if I, a Black woman, standing naked in the middle of the street, wasn’t even there at all.”
Nona Faustine was born in Brooklyn in 1977. Her father and uncle were amateur photographers and “put the camera in my hand,” Faustine told photographer Carla J. Williams in a 2024Bombmagazine interview. She graduated from the School of the Visual Arts in 1997 and earned an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College in 2013. Drawn early on to street and documentary photography, she shot a series titled “Young Mothers” while still an undergraduate, centering women who had borne children while in high school. In 2008, she began photographing her mother, her sister, her daughter, and herself for “Mitochondria,” a series commenting on familial bonds as well as the ways in which Black women have historically supported one another.
Faustine inaugurated the “White Shoes” series while at ICP after reading about Saartjie Baartman, an enslaved South African woman exhibited as a physical curiosity in Europe. The artist appeared largely nude in the early works, though she slowly dressed herself as the series evolved, for example introducing a skirt slip. Her white high heels at once conjuring the fancy footwear of churchgoing women and the whiteness that people of color are expected to mimic, Faustine descended upon locations throughout New York’s five boroughs where enslaved people had been brought, sold, or buried, camera in hand. Thanks to the typically public and highly visible nature of these sites, Faustine was often forced to adopt a guerrilla approach. “I was on the steps of the New York State Supreme Court on Centre Street, and I had already been there three times,” she told Williams. “First time, I didn’t get it. Second time, didn’t get it. I tried again and I nailed it. My sister and I jumped into a cab, just before the cops came. I wasgiddy. I was laughing to myself because I knew I nailed it. I knew I got the picture. And, you know,” she concluded, “I felt like I was giving one to the man.”
In 2016, Faustine had her first-ever solo exhibition, held at New York’s Baxter St. Camera Club. On view alongside works from “White Shoes” was “Say Her Name,” a memorial to Sandra Bland who had died in police custody the previous year, for which Faustine photographed herself lying as though dead in her own apartment. By this time, Faustine’s work had taken on a conceptual element, embodied for example in her 2019 series “My Country,” a group of silk screens showing partly obscured US monuments, their obfuscation recalling that which has historically attended the contributions of Black Americans.
“White Shoes” continued to be fiercely relevant. In 2017,Artforuminvited Faustine to comment on the election of Donald Trump as president. She provided justtwo stark images: one of herself, nude save for her trademark white pumps, ascending the steps of New York’s Tweed Courthouse, which is built atop a colonial-era African burial ground; and another showing a metal fence bearing government-issued signage reading AREA CLOSED, the Capitol behind it, blurry in the distance.
“[Faustine] gives the violated nakedness of slavery the heroism of the nude,” wroteThe Guardian’s Jonathan Jones in 2015. “Her carnal history paintings in the streets of Manhattan bring home once again the violence against humanity that still scars America.”
“‘White Shoes’ is not just about slavery and suffering and sorrow,” Faustine told Williams. “Showing my body in that way, I go through stages. You see me on Wall Street on that slave block, but you also see me in other places where I am powerful and my nudity is like armor. I’m confronting you with this big fleshy body, and it is something to be celebrated—a body that carried a child, a body that gave birth, a body that is feminine, and a body that is joy.”
Faustine’s first major retrospective took place at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York; and the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park.