‘What My Mother Gave Me’: Monuments of Flesh

Reclaiming memory, motherhood, and the Black female body in Nona Faustine’s first retrospective.

Nona Faustine’s ‘What My Mother Gave Me’ unfolds as both an intimate archive and a political reckoning. The exhibition, the artist’s first retrospective, gathers nearly three decades of work to reveal how Faustine collapsed the distance between the personal and the historical, positioning the Black female body as a living site of memory.

Working across series such as Young Mothers, Mitochondria, and the now-iconic White Shoes, Faustine traces matrilineal continuity while confronting the afterlives of slavery embedded within urban space. Her images move between tenderness and defiance. Early photographs linger in the fragile intimacies of young motherhood, while later works assert the artist’s own body, often nude, against sites of erasure and violence, transforming them into counter-monuments of presence.

What emerges is a visual language rooted in ancestral knowledge and feminist urgency. Faustine’s practice insists that history is not distant but embodied, carried through generations of Black women whose care, resilience, and resistance shape both private life and public consciousness.

In this exhibition, photography becomes an act of return. Not only to place, but to lineage, to memory, and to the enduring power of what is passed from mother to daughter.