Nona Faustine

Hold These Truths

• Fragment of Evidence, Statue of Liberty, 2016
  Digital c-print archival pigment print
  32 x 42 inches framed
  Edition 1 of 5
  Courtesy of the artist

Photographer Nona Faustine focuses on overlooked histories, identity and representation, with an emphasis on African-American history and her own ancestral past.

In the series My Country, Faustine employs the use of a hazy black line to obstruct or seemingly redact national monuments. The black bar serves as a reference to the restrictions or barriers experienced by people of color in “the land of liberty”. It can also be seen as a reclamation of place for marginalized communities in a country that still struggles to understand what being American really means or looks like.

In the series White Shoes, Faustine uses photography and her own body to both document and reinsert the black figure into an idealized white American narrative and to demarcate former slavery sites in New York City. Interrogating New York’s slaveholding history, her nakedness speaks to the vulnerability and dehumanization of the black female body.