Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum photograph
Caption
Nona Faustine American, born 1977. Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn, 2016. Chromogenic print, sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 9/16 × 40 in. (67.5 × 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41c. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2017.41c_PS20.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn
Date
2016
Medium
Chromogenic print
Classification
Dimensions
sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 9/16 × 40 in. (67.5 × 101.6 cm)
Credit Line
Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
Accession Number
2017.41c
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.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".
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