Artist Nona Faustine, whose self-portraits memorialized under-recognized narratives and fearlessly confronted violent histories, died on Thursday morning, March 20, at the age of 48 in New York City. The news of her passing was confirmed by the New York gallery Higher Pictures. The cause of her death has not been made public.
Grounded in extensive research, Faustine’s photography often explored complex concepts of legacy, representation, trauma, and identity as they related to racial and gender stereotypes. Her work balanced critical reexaminations of White violence and settler colonialism with powerful tributes to ancestors whose stories had long been suppressed, ignored, or undervalued.
“Nona Faustine was brave in a way that most women and men are not, in a way that I have never been: placing her naked self before the gaze of anyone who happens upon her work in order to redirect their attention to a history and social truth that’s both pertinent and largely invisible,” said critic and former Hyperallergic editor Seph Rodney, an early champion of Faustine’s work.
“If we want to talk about our present-day heroes, we need to start with her,” Rodney said.
Faustine was best known for her self-portrait series White Shoes (2012–2021), in which she posed nude or partially clothed in symbolic white heels at various former slave auction sites across New York. These places included the Tweed Courthouse, where Faustine pictured herself naked and pushing against a stone column at the top of the steps leading into the building; and the Wall Street intersection of Water and Pearl Street, where she appeared with shackled wrists standing on a wooden box as traffic whirs in the background.
Last year, the series (which was still ongoing) was spotlighted in its entirety for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum. Consisting of 43 photographs, the show was also Faustine’s first solo museum exhibition.
“Her vulnerable and commanding work urges us to think critically about the hidden, often traumatic histories of the places we call home,” the Brooklyn Museum said in an Instagram post last week as tributes to the artist poured in from around the nation. (At her family’s request, Hyperallergic waited to report on the news of her death.)
In a 2019 interview with Musée magazine, Faustine described nudity as a way of “celebrating and reclaiming the black body in art specifically” by inverting the oppressive logic of photographs of enslaved people taken under duress, such as the notorious images of Louis Agassiz.
“I really wanted to answer and challenge those images within my own way of reclaiming. I knew the power of the black body, and specifically of my fleshy, large body,” Faustine told Musée. “I also celebrated and loved that, having become a mother shortly before I started this series.”
Born in 1977 in Brooklyn, Faustine was raised in Crown Heights by a family of photography enthusiasts and gravitated toward the medium at a young age. She drew inspiration by flipping through family photo albums and viewing monographs of photographers such as Diane Arbus and Ernst Haas. In a 2024 interview, she said her father and uncle “ordained” her into the art form. “[They] were the ones who put the camera in my hand and introduced me to photography; it was just natural that I had this affinity for the camera and pictures,” she said.
Faustine later studied photography at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1997. It was during her undergraduate studies that she was exposed to the work of Black photographers, like Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, and women artists like Sally Mann. More than a decade later, in 2013, she earned her Master’s degree from the International Center of Photography at Bard College.
“I was lucky enough to have a mother and a sister who believed in me; they pushed me to return to school and return to photography. ‘Get that degree woman.’ ‘Don’t let your talent go to waste,’ they told me,” she wrote in an essay for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.
Faustine’s first solo exhibition, My Country, was held at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York in 2016. The exhibition centered on photographs that grappled with the perpetuated mythologies of national monuments, depicting sites like the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial through a partially obstructed lens.
“The artist contends that the putatively ‘national’ monument (that is supposed to be representative of the nation) is seen but never possessed by some, and particularly her access to it is restricted. But she is defiant,” Rodney wrote at the time.
The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Faustine had most recently completed a fellowship with the American Academy in Rome. Her work is held in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center at Maryland State University, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, among others.