Nona Faustine, The Armory Show, New York

Nona Faustine, The Armory Show, New York
September 9 – 11, 2022
Javits Center

 

For her White Shoes series, Faustine documents, occupies, and reclaims sites across New York City that are linked to its 200-year history of slavery, while responding with redoubled urgency to the echoes of that history in America today. In an extended, iterative performance for the camera, Faustine—often nude, in her signature white pumps—is both unflinching and vulnerable. The artist uses her body and presence as counter-monument, confronting our country’s past, refusing an ongoing erasure of the history that holds us back, and compelling us to find a different way forward.

This presentation is the first time Faustine’s White Shoes 2013 – 2021 (The Portfolio), a set of 20 photographs from the series, has been exhibited.

In White Shoes Faustine’s presence is both grounded but also otherworldly – she is time traveler and prophet. Of the series, Jessica Lanay writes: “[Faustine’s] pushing of space with her form is the warping of temporal structures; her masquerade through photographs is an erosion of the given. Faustine cries power.”[1]

Nona Faustine was born and raised in Brooklyn, where she lives and works. Faustine earned her MFA from Bard College in 2013 and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. White Shoes, her first monograph, was published by MACK in 2021. Recent group exhibitions include Fantasy America (2021) at the Andy Warhol Museum; MONUMENTS NOW (2020) at Socrates Sculpture Park and Half The Picture: A Feminist Look At The Collection (2018) at the Brooklyn Museum.

[1] Jessica Lanay, “I CRIED—POWER (POWER, LORD). The Afrofantastique in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes,” in Nona Faustine: White Shoes (London: MACK Books, 2021), p. 14.