Features

Artist Nona Faustine (BFA 1994 Photography)—whose work on Black womanhood, African American history, and the obscured role of New York City in America’s slave trade received wide acclaim—died last week, as confirmed by the Brooklyn Museum.

Faustine is best known for “White Shoes,” a series of photographs featuring herself—wearing white heels and often nude or semi-nude—at locations in New York City that were pivotal to the slave trade or the lives of its enslaved people but are often without markers that acknowledge their significance. “White Shoes” was published by Mack as a book in 2021 and the subject of a solo exhibition last year at the Brooklyn Museum. Her other series included “Mitochondria,” comprising photographs of her family and multigenerational home, and “My Country,” a collection of silk screens presenting images of American monuments that had been blurred or partly obscured to suggest the complicated stories behind the iconography, and the uncredited contributions of Black Americans throughout U.S. history.

In addition to her School of Visual Arts degree, Faustine held an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College. Her honors included an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship and the inaugural BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; David C. Driskell Center, Maryland State University; and Studio Museum of Harlem.

Faustine and her work were featured in the cover story of the spring/summer 2023 issue of SVA’s magazine, the Visual Arts Journal, written by her classmate Dan Halm (MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1994 Illustration).

“If we are going to live in a new kind of world and society, one of equal footing . . . we have to get real,” Faustine told Halm. “Really, at the core of art is healing.”

To read the Visual Arts Journal feature on Faustine, click here.