Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn
Caption
Nona Faustine American, born 1977. Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn, 2016. Chromogenic print, sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 9/16 × 40 in. (67.5 × 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41b. © artist or artist's estate
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn
Date
2016
Medium
Chromogenic print
Classification
Dimensions
sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 9/16 × 40 in. (67.5 × 101.6 cm)
Credit Line
Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
Accession Number
2017.41b
Rights
© artist or artist's estate
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Frequent Art Questions
How were Nona Faustine’s self portraits received by the general public? Does she have other notable pieces?
Through this image, and the others in the White Shoes series, Nona Faustine dismantles the notion of an ever-progressive NYC by posing nude at sites connected to slavery. They include former locations of a burial ground, a slave market, and the home of one of New York's earliest dynastic, slave-owning families, the Lefferts.Nona Faustine has been showing consistently. She had a critically acclaimed exhibition called "My Country" in New York in 2016. She has received numerous awards, including Anonymous Was a Woman and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, both in 2019.The white shoes that she wears in the image and has tied into the waist of her skirt are key iconography across the series, but she hasn't spoken much about their meaning. She prefers to hear viewers' own interpretations.
Through these images, and others in the series, Faustine poses at sites in New York connected to slavery to document histories that are being erased.Do you have any context to share for Nona Faustine's garb in her self portraits outside Lefferts House?
In particular the children's shoes...These images are part of her larger White Shoes series that include white shoes in various forms. Faustine doesn't speak about their meaning, however. She prefers that viewers come up with and share their own interpretations.What did you think they meant when you first saw them?It made me think of the novel Beloved.The double edged sword of having children for slave women, knowing what their future holds.Interesting. A few visitors have also mentioned that the shoes reminded them of lost children.Motherhood also factors into these images in another very different way. After having her first child, Faustine felt much more confident in her body. She said that her past insecurities now empowered her. And it was after giving birth that she began including her own nude body in her work.She said: "The nudity is in solidarity with enslaved people and the way we were often put on display when sold or photographed or drawn."That feels so right.I am teaching a course on colonial NYC and trying to see how the settler colonial extermination generated solidarity with slaves, across national and racial identities.
Did you see the piece by Nona Faustine in "Half the Picture"? She addresses slavery in New York. The pieces are "Not Gone With The Wind, Lefferts House, Brooklyn"; "Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn"; and "Lobbying the Gods for a Miracle, Brooklyn".
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