Nona Faustine, who passed away this March, was magnificent—a valiant beacon of light in a world often cruel and dismissive of Black women’s histories and lives. When pondering Faustine’s impact on the art world, I think of Toni Morrison’s 1987 eulogy for James Baldwin: “It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that ‘this world [meaning history] is white no longer and it will never be white again.’” In Faustine’s prolific series White Shoes (2012–21), she photographs herself at sites associated with New York’s oft-overlooked history of racial slavery. Whether the location is the coast, a farm, burial grounds, or auction sites, Faustine stages embodied interventions in which her body, often naked, marks the location. Her nude form draws attention to the vulnerability of the enslaved in relation to the auction block and the lack of privacy or self-possession. It is a gut-wrenchingly vulnerable process, in which Faustine—a plus-size Black woman—returns to these sites with her nude enfleshment as a formal strategy. Akin to Morrison’s conceptualization of Baldwin, Faustine seized visibility and recognition at places representing both cruelty and resilience, ensuring that the visual records of these spaces can never be whitewashed because her oeuvre survives.
A cogent photograph from White Shoes, titled From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013), is Faustine’s corporeal refusal to forget Wall Street’s slave-market past. Faustine appears as a solitary, monumental figure standing on a wooden block, gazing forward, unfaltering. Vulnerable yet commanding, her presence interrupts the neoclassical facade of commerce and empire. I read the photograph as a living, fleshy archive of racial slavery: the pillars of capitalism rising behind her and the urban streets beneath her hold the blood, sweat, and tears of the enslaved, whose exploited labor formed the backbone of the global economy in Western modernity. Many Americans do not know that slavery is central to the early history of the urban North; for example, from 1711 to 1762, New York’s first slave market operated on Wall Street. What was once a brutal marketplace for trafficking in human flesh is now a financial district where global capital is consolidated through twenty-first-century modes of exploitation. Moreover, the title’s allusion to reproduction signals a harsh reality: global capitalism is predicated on the wombs of enslaved Black women. At slave auctions, wealthy white New Yorkers also invested in the reproductive potential of enslaved people, enabled by partus sequitur ventrem—the legal doctrine dictating that children born to enslaved mothers inherited their mother’s status.
Nona Faustine, From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth, Wall St., NYC, 2013. ©The Estate of Nona Faustine, Courtesy Higher Pictures.
Black motherhood is a central motif in Faustine’s work. One could interpret her photographs as Black maternal and matriarchal archives, as they allude to both the exploitation and resistance of Black motherhood. As a mother and feminist, Faustine deeply understood how Black motherhood has been commodified, exploited, and mythologized throughout American history. In the haunting image Like a Pregnant Corpse the Ship Expelled Her into the Patriarchy, Atlantic Coast, Brooklyn, NY (2012), Faustine’s body is draped across jagged rocks like the wreckage of a life cast ashore, evoking the visceral aftermath of catastrophes like the Zong Massacre of 1781, when trafficked Africans were thrown overboard for insurance purposes. Pregnancy (of “the corpse”) becomes a symbol of the gendered violence inflicted upon enslaved women, suggesting how the brutal rupture of the Middle Passage marked not only a collective social death, but also paradoxically gave rise to African American identity itself. That Faustine’s work so often refers to the enslaved woman’s position seems to answer Hortense Spillers’s call in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (1987) for a radical rethinking of Black womanhood and kinship from the perspective of the enslaved mother, who was denied normative gender from the start. Slavery, as a point of rupture, becomes a space for political and communal possibility—a site to rewrite the grammar, in the sense of the rules, of motherhood.
The first generation of Black feminists in North America emerged from this historical context of slavery and abolition. In another photograph, Faustine poses in a long, flowing white skirt, holding a sign that says “AR’N’T I A WOMAN,” at 74 Canal Street, where Sojourner Truth once lived. A reference to Truth’s famous 1851 abolitionist and women’s-rights speech, Faustine’s photography traces the spaces and places of early Black feminist historiography. These Black matrilineal lineages are honored in Faustine’s other series as well, such as Mitochondria (2008–), which documents the beauty and kinship of three generations of women: Faustine’s mother, the artist herself, and her daughter. Faustine shared so much with us. Her deep and abiding love for her ancestors and living kin was a blueprint for a more honest understanding of New York’s history, and an unapologetic visual record of her body used as an intervention in various sites.
Nona Faustine, Sojourner Truth, 74 Canal St., New York, NY, 2016. ©The Estate of Nona Faustine, Courtesy Higher Pictures.
In reflecting on the devastating loss of Faustine, other Black feminist philosophies come to mind. I recall Myisha Priest’s poignant analysis in her 2008 essay “Salvation is the Issue,” which discusses how Black women artists and intellectuals—including Audre Lorde, Sylvia Ardyn Boone, June Jordan, and now Faustine—have been vulnerable to premature death, often from cancer or other illnesses. In Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2006), Saidiya Hartman theorizes the brutal calculus of Black people’s skewed life chances in the afterlife of slavery. Still, Faustine’s practice encourages boldness and perseverance. Her bravery as an artist should mobilize us all into a more courageous relationship to art, history, and society. If we are to follow her path, we must be audacious. Our indebtedness to Faustine begins with strengthening our collective understanding of slavery, Black feminism, and the plight of the Black woman artist in an art world that often fails to grasp the nuances of Black women’s lived experiences.
Faustine’s eternal spirit and connectedness with the ancestors are evident in the photograph Protection, African Burial Ground Monument, NYC (2021). Cloaked in radiant gold and kneeling at a sacred site—the lower Manhattan monument for the 419 Africans buried there during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Faustine is encircled by Adinkra symbols etched into the monument’s black stone. She is both mourner and embodiment of ancestral copresence. At her feet lies a bouquet of flowers, an offering to the ancestors and a sign of life. The sunlight reflecting off her glistening shroud and the monument’s polished surface accentuates the photograph’s transcendent, luminescent feeling. It is beautiful in the way all of Faustine’s self-portraits are: ethereal, abundant, and often serene. As an art historian who is a fat Black woman navigating spaces where we are taught to shrink ourselves, I witness Faustine’s self-portraits reclaiming history, beauty, and space for Black women.
Ultimately, Faustine’s artistic practice boldly honors the lives and legacies of our free and enslaved ancestors, especially those erased from historical memory. Her evocative self-portraits and site-specific photography confront the painful truths of slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice, grounding these realities in the present. Now, as she joins the ranks of the ancestors, her legacy endures—guiding future generations with the same fierce truth and reverence she gave to those who came before.
