Artist Nona Faustine, whose self-portraits recognized under recognized stories and confronted with fearless violent histories, died on Thursday morning 20 March at the age of 48 in New York City. The news of her death was confirmed by the New York Gallery Higher Pictures. The cause of her death has not been made public.
Focused in extensive research, Faustine photography often investigated complex concepts of legacy, representation, trauma and identity as they related to racial and gender stereotypes. Her work brought critical re -examination of white violence and settlement colonialism in balance with powerful tribute to ancestors whose stories had long been suppressed, ignored or undervalued.
“Nona Faustine was brave in a way that most women and men are not, in a way that I have never been: putting her naked himself for the gaze of someone who happens to focus on a history and social truth that is both relevant and largely invisible,” said critic and first. Hyperallergic Editor Seph Rodney, an early champion of Faustine’s work.
“If we want to talk about our current heroes, we have to start with her,” said Rodney.
Faustine was best known for its self -portrait series White shoes (2012–2021), in which she posed naked or partially in symbolic white heels on various former slave auction sites in New York. These places include the tweed -court building, where Faustine introduced itself naked and pushed against a stone column at the top of the stairs to the building; And the intersection of Wall Street van Water and Pearl Street, where she appeared with chained wrists that stood on a wooden box while traffic floats in the background.
Last year the series (which was still underway) was in its entirety in the Brooklyn Museum for the first time. Consisting of 43 photos, the show was also Faustine’s first Solo Museum exhibition.
“Her vulnerable and impressive work encourages us to think critically about the hidden, often traumatic histories of the places we mention at home,” said the Brooklyn Museum in a Instagram Post last week as a tribute to the artist from the entire nation. (At the request of her family, Hyperallergic waited to report on the news of her death.)
In an interview in 2019 with Mosée Magazine, Faustine, described nudity as a way to “celebrate and reclaim the black body in art specifically in art” by reversing the oppressive logic of photos made to slave who have taken into force, such as the notorious images of Louis Agassiz.
“I really wanted to answer and challenge those images in my own way of recovering. I knew the power of the black body, and specifically from my fleshy, big body,” Faustine said Mosée. “I celebrated that too and I liked that because I had become a mother shortly before I started this series.”
Faustine, born in 1977 in Brooklyn, was raised in Crown Heights by a family of photography enthusiasts and attracted to the medium at a young age. She attracted inspiration by browsing family photo albums and viewing monographs from photographers such as Diane Arbus and Ernst Haas. In a 2024 interviewShe said that her father and uncle ‘decorated’ her in the art form. ‘[They] were those who put the camera in my hand and introduced me to photography; It was of course just that I had this affinity for the camera and photos, “she said.
Faustine later studied photography at the School of Visual Arts, graduated in 1997. It was During her non -graduated studies That she was exposed to the work of black photographers, such as Gordon Parks and Roy Decarava, and female artists such as Sally Mann. More than ten years later, in 2013, she obtained her master’s degree at the International Center of Photography at Bard College.
“I was lucky to have a mother and a sister who believed in me; they pushed me to return to school and return to photography.” Get that degree woman. ” “Don’t let your talent be lost,” they told me, “she wrote in one essay For the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
Faustine’s first solo exhibition, My countrywas held in 2016 in Baxter Street in the New York Camera Club. The exhibition was aimed at photos that struggled with the existing mythologies of national monuments, with locations such as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial through a partially curved lens.
“The artist argues that the presumably ‘national’ monument (which is supposed to be representative of the nation) is seen, but never possessed by some, and especially her access to that is limited. But she is challenging,” Rodney wrote at the time.
The recipient of countless prizes and awards, Faustine had recently completed a fellowship with the American Academy in Rome. Her work is being held in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center on Maryland State University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, among other things.
