Support Independent Arts Journalism As an independent publication, we rely on readers like you to fund our journalism and keep our reporting and criticism free and accessible to all. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, consider becoming a member today. Nona Faustine’s self-portraits are politically incisive, historically grounded, and spiritually transcendent.
Placing her own abundant and carefully posed body at the center of locales haunted by history, she stages embodied interventions. Her White Shoes series on display at the Brooklyn Museum, in toto for the first time, demands an extensive reckoning with the histories and afterlives of slavery, settler colonialism, and genocidal violence against Black and Indigenous peoples in what we now call New York. In “Black Indian, Andrew Williams Home Site, Seneca Village, Central Park, NYC” (2021), Faustine lounges in a sun hat and white dress while reading the book Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (1986) by historian William Loren Katz, which narrates histories of Black-Indigenous encounters and exchanges in the United States.
Andrew Williams was the first African American to purchase land in Seneca Village, where Black New Yorkers lived in Manhattan for decades before the city demolished it in 1857. Elsewhere, Faustine stands topless in a flowing white cotton skirt holding a sign that reads “AR’N’T I A WOMAN” — a tribute to abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, who exclaimed those words .