Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn

2016

In this series of self-portraits, Nona Faustine inserts her own body into the history and architecture of slavery in New York City. In two photographs, she poses defiantly outside the Lefferts House in nearby Prospect Park. The house was home to descendants of the prominent namesake Dutch landowners and more than a dozen enslaved people between the 1780s and 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York. The interlaced children’s shoes, cast-iron skillet, and smoking revolver add a narrative dimension to the photographs, alluding to the ways Black women experienced and resisted the horrors of enslavement and carry its legacies today.