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The Arts Intel Report

Nona Faustine: White Shoes

Nona Faustine, “Walk to Freedom Frederick Douglass,” Church St. & Lispenard St., NYC, 2015.

Mar 8 – July 7, 2024
200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA

“I am a conduit traveling through space and time, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land,” says the Brooklyn-born visual artist Nona Faustine. In her photographic series “White Shoes,” Faustine confronts New York City’s often unacknowledged history of slavery. Over 40 self-portraits show the artist posing fully or partially nude in front of various sites in New York that carry legacies of enslavement. Faustine wears the same pair of white high heels in each photograph. Reminiscent of “Church Lady” shoes, they serve as a symbol of colonialism and assimilation. In Faustine’s first solo museum exhibition, she appears simultaneously strong and unprotected, reminding us of “the vulnerability and powerlessness of slavery,” as Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, in 2015. —Jeanne Malle