Nona Faustine

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Situated where “intersecting identities meet history,” Nona Faustine’s photographic works mine “the legacy of trauma, lineage, and history in order to reconstruct narratives of race, memory, and time.” Her critically acclaimed series, White Shoes, in which she stages herself, often nude but for her white footwear, in front of sites associated with slavery in New York has been described by the New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz as giving a “paradoxical impression of terrible vulnerability” and “courageous defiance, of the power that comes from baring one’s body without shame or coyness or fear, particularly when that body happens to be of a color and a shape so often slandered as threatening or unbeautiful.” She holds an MFA from Bard’s International Center of Photography, where she studied with Bennington photographer and VA faculty-member, Liz Deschenes, among others.