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Looking with Nona Faustine

Portraiture, Performance, and Possession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2025

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Abstract

Contemporary visual artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series stages and documents her reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. Considering Faustine’s self-portrait series not only as photography but also as performance documentation invites theorizations of memorial practices (rather than monumental objects) and their affordances for liberatory aesthetic projects.

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TDR , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 2025 , pp. 98 - 115
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of New York University Tisch School of the Arts

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References

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