Not Gone With The Wind, Lefferts House, Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum photograph
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The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.
Photographer Nona Faustine’s series White Shoes includes over 40 self-portraits showing her standing in sites built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—from Harlem to Wall Street to Prospect Park and beyond. On her feet are a pair of white pumps, which speak to the oppressions of colonialism and assimilation imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally. Otherwise nude, partially covered, or holding props, Faustine appears at once vulnerable and commanding, standing in solidarity with ancestors whose bodies and memories form an archive in the land beneath her shoes.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Faustine uses her own body to ask the question: “What does a Black person look like today in those places where Africans were once sold, a century and a half ago?” With this now iconic series, presented in 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum, the artist urges us to think critically about the hidden, often traumatic histories of the places we call home. As these stories are being erased from public school curricula nationwide, White Shoes moves us to consider the enduring impact that the past has on our present.
Object Label
In a series of self-portraits taken at various New York City locations, Nona Faustine confronts the viewer, taking possession of sites where enslaved African Americans lived, or where they were sold or buried, such as at the Lefferts House homestead in Brooklyn. Located a short distance south of the Brooklyn Museum in present-day Prospect Park, the Lefferts House and surrounding property were owned by a wealthy Dutch family whose fortune was sustained by slave labor. By positioning her partially naked body at these locations—which too easily appear benign today—Faustine demands recognition of the history of slavery in the United States, and our ongoing reckoning with its legacies.
Caption
Nona Faustine American, born 1977. Not Gone With The Wind, Lefferts House, Brooklyn, 2016. Chromogenic print, sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 5/8 × 40 in. (67.6 × 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41a. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2017.41a_PS20.jpg)
Tags
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Not Gone With The Wind, Lefferts House, Brooklyn
Date
2016
Medium
Chromogenic print
Classification
Dimensions
sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 5/8 × 40 in. (67.6 × 101.6 cm)
Credit Line
Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
Accession Number
2017.41a
Rights
© artist or artist's estate
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Frequent Art Questions
How were Nona Faustine’s self portraits received by the general public? Does she have other notable pieces?
Through this image, and the others in the White Shoes series, Nona Faustine dismantles the notion of an ever-progressive NYC by posing nude at sites connected to slavery. They include former locations of a burial ground, a slave market, and the home of one of New York's earliest dynastic, slave-owning families, the Lefferts.Nona Faustine has been showing consistently. She had a critically acclaimed exhibition called "My Country" in New York in 2016. She has received numerous awards, including Anonymous Was a Woman and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, both in 2019.The white shoes that she wears in the image and has tied into the waist of her skirt are key iconography across the series, but she hasn't spoken much about their meaning. She prefers to hear viewers' own interpretations.
Through these images, and others in the series, Faustine poses at sites in New York connected to slavery to document histories that are being erased.Do you have any context to share for Nona Faustine's garb in her self portraits outside Lefferts House?
In particular the children's shoes...These images are part of her larger White Shoes series that include white shoes in various forms. Faustine doesn't speak about their meaning, however. She prefers that viewers come up with and share their own interpretations.What did you think they meant when you first saw them?It made me think of the novel Beloved.The double edged sword of having children for slave women, knowing what their future holds.Interesting. A few visitors have also mentioned that the shoes reminded them of lost children.Motherhood also factors into these images in another very different way. After having her first child, Faustine felt much more confident in her body. She said that her past insecurities now empowered her. And it was after giving birth that she began including her own nude body in her work.She said: "The nudity is in solidarity with enslaved people and the way we were often put on display when sold or photographed or drawn."That feels so right.I am teaching a course on colonial NYC and trying to see how the settler colonial extermination generated solidarity with slaves, across national and racial identities.
Did you see the piece by Nona Faustine in "Half the Picture"? She addresses slavery in New York. The pieces are "Not Gone With The Wind, Lefferts House, Brooklyn"; "Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn"; and "Lobbying the Gods for a Miracle, Brooklyn".Tell me more.
Nona Faustine dismantles the notion of an ever-progressive NYC by posing nude at sites connected to slavery.They include former locations of a burial ground, a slave market, and the home of one of New York's earliest dynastic, slave-owning families, the Lefferts.
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