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Collection Data
- Description
- Nona Faustine (1977-2025) was a New York City-based photographer and visual artist known for exploration of identity and her ancestry. The portfolio contains color pigment prints from her photography series Mitochondria (2008-2015) and White Shoes (2012-2021).
- Names
- Faustine, Nona (Creator)
- Dates / Origin
- Date Created: 2008 - 2021
- Library locations
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division
- Shelf locator: Sc Photo Nona Faustine portfolio
- Topics
- African American women photographers
- Female nude in art
- Motherhood in art
- Photographers
- Self-portraits
- Women, Black, in art
- Genres
- Photographs
- Notes
- Biographical/historical: Nona Faustine (1977-2025) was a photographer and visual artist known for her conceptual self-portraiture and exploration of identity and her ancestry. In the photographic series White Shoes (2012-2021), Faustine applied her research from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and other institutions to self-portraits she created across New York City at sites associated with enslavement.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Faustine was introduced to photography by her father, who was an amateur photographer. As a child, she admired the work of Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Ernst Haas. She later became frustrated that publications and museums often did not include a broad array of visual representations featuring Black people, especially Black women. During her undergraduate studies at School of Visual Arts in New York City, Faustine primarily engaged the documentary mode to construct images. She earned her Bachelors in Fine Art in 1997. Several years later she deepened her studies by pursuing her Masters in Fine Art at the International Center of Photography (ICP) - Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. During this period, she found documentary insufficient for expressing her growing interests in the African presence in early New York and layered issues of identity. Inspired by the practices of Black women photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems, Renee Cox, and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Faustine adopted a more conceptual approach as she developed her own visual language for image-making through investigations of time, place, embodiment, and portraiture. She graduated from ICP in 2013.
During her time at ICP, Faustine worked on two photographic series: Mitochondria (2008-2015) and White Shoes. The former explores Faustine's family, depicting three generations of women--her mother, her sister, herself, and her child--sharing an apartment in Brooklyn. This series celebrates how Black women love and support one another, and stems from Faustine's desire to make family portraiture as fundamental for her daughter as her father did for her.
In White Shoes Faustine engages portraiture to reclaim history and dignity. Situated at various locations associated with enslavement in metropolitan New York City, Faustine photographed herself nude and seminude to both convey the experiences enslaved women were subjected to and to challenge biases against and limitations put on representations of Black women's bodies. Throughout the series, she wears a pair of white pumps, symbolizing respect and beauty. By inhabiting these spaces, which include African burial grounds, auction sites, and Sojourner Truth's home, that are often unacknowledged by historic markers, Faustine makes erased histories and the constructions of race, femininity, family, time, and place visible. The series was published as a photobook in 2021 and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024.
Faustine's work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2019 Faustine was awarded the Colene Brown Art Prize. That year she also was the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2024, she secured the Rome Prize in visual art from the American Academy in Rome.
Faustine died in 2025 in New York City.
- Content: The Nona Faustine portfolio contains prints by the artist Nona Faustine from two photographic series, Mitochondria (2008-2015) and White Shoes (2012-2021).
There are forty-three color pigment prints: thirty prints from Mitochondria, and thirteen from White Shoes. Prints in the White Shoes series include two large prints of "From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth" and "They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse," a memorial print of "Dorothy Angola, Stay Free, In Land Of The Blacks, Minetta Lane, Village" and ten assorted working prints.
In addition to the prints, each series contains two gallery inserts signed by Faustine with print sizes and edition information for White Shoes and Mitochondria.
All prints were made by the artist, excluding the memorial print, which was printed posthumously by the gallery Higher Pictures.
- Physical Description
- Extent: 43 photographic prints
- Extent: 3 boxes, 2 containers 0.75 linear feet
- Type of Resource
- Still image
- Identifiers
- Other local Identifier: Sc Photo Nona Faustine portfolio
- NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b24048184
- MSS Unit ID: 188419
- Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): c11aff20-9d9c-013f-b3d2-0242ac110003
