The exhibition, titled “Nona Faustine: White Shoes,” aims to place a spotlight on New York City’s buried involvement in the slave trade
From March 8 to July 7, 2024, the Brooklyn Museum will be showcasing a new art exhibition titled Nona Faustine: White Shoes.
Created by Brooklyn-born artist Nona Faustine — who will be making her solo museum debut — the exhibit aims to place a spotlight on New York City’s buried involvement in the slave trade through a series of self-portraits, taken at several locations across the city’s five boroughs and Long Island.
Throughout her collection of over 40 photographs, Faustine visits a number of innocuous urban landscapes — including Harlem, Wall Street, and Prospect Park, to name a few — and exposes them as prior “sites of trauma,” as well as “spaces of great resilience,” according to a release.
“As a born and bred Brooklynite, Nona Faustine’s project White Shoes makes the history of this city present and personal,” said Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art (education facility at the Brooklyn Museum).
“Faustine invites each of us to consider the stories we can’t see in the neighborhoods where we spend our days — to question what we know and what we don’t know about the places we call home.”
As alluded in the exhibition’s name, the photos display Faustine sporting a pair of white pumps or “Church Lady” shoes, which the artist says is a reference to themes like colonialism, assimilation, and Black propriety.
While wearing the symbolic footwear, Faustine poses at the various NYC locales fully nude, a decision the Brooklyn artist made to display vulnerability and to stand in solidarity “with ancestors whose memories form an archive in the land on which she stands.”
“White Shoes captures the historical amnesia of New York City, a city much like the rest of the country that has not fully reckoned with its past,” said Faustine. “I am a conduit traveling through space and time, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but are embedded in the land.”
