by Jeroslyn JoVonn
March 24, 2025
Faustine died only one 12 months after her first solo exhibition.
Famend photographer Nona Faustine, recognized for her highly effective work capturing the resilience of Black girls all through historical past, has died. She was 48.
Faustine’s reason behind dying was not revealed, ARTnews studies. The Brooklyn Museum, the place Faustine’s works have been exhibited final 12 months, launched a press release confirming her dying.
“We’re saddened by the dying of Brooklyn-born artist Nona Faustine,” the museum captioned an Instagram submit. “Her susceptible and commanding work urges us to assume critically in regards to the hidden, typically traumatic histories of the locations we name house.”
Her 2024 exhibition on the Brooklyn Museum marked her first solo present and featured the total set up of her acclaimed photographic sequence, White Footwear. Comprised of over 40 self-portraits, the sequence captured Faustine standing at historic websites throughout New York Metropolis—from Harlem and Wall Road to Prospect Park—that held legacies of enslavement.
Usually nude, partially coated, or holding symbolic props, she wears a easy but poignant pair of white pumps, standing atop land that holds the reminiscences and the stays of Black and Indigenous ancestors, in accordance with the Brooklyn Museum. Faustine gained recognition for her highly effective self-portraits, utilizing her physique as a residing archive of each exploitation and resilience all through historical past.
In a single placing picture from White Footwear, Faustine stands at 74 Wall Road, a historic website the place enslaved folks have been as soon as auctioned.
“The true lives of Black girls in the USA, if not on the earth, are usually not seen,” Faustine advised photographer Carla J. Williams in a 2024 subject of BOMB journal. “I wished to point out our lives and who we’re. We’re very particular. Not simply due to our struggling however due to our magnificence and power. The reinvention and the creativity that oozes out. The bravery.”
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1977, the Crown Heights native grew up surrounded by pictures. She credited her father and uncle, each avid pictures lovers, for sparking her ardour within the medium. She spent a lot of her childhood wanting by her household’s photograph albums.
Faustine pursued her love for pictures on the Faculty of Visible Arts, incomes her diploma in 1997. Most just lately, she accomplished a fellowship with the American Academy in Rome, the place she was joined by her daughter, Queen.
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