In conversation with Nona Faustine (Jan. 15, 2018) скачать в хорошем качестве

In conversation with Nona Faustine (Jan. 15, 2018)

Artist Nona Faustine Simmons is a born and bred Brooklyner with roots in the South. Her parents moved from North Carolina to a pre-gentrified Brooklyn in the second wave of the Great Migration. So, both New York City and the American South loom large in her artistic work. As a black woman and descendant of slaves, she photographs herself nude in sites of slavery around New York City, uniting her personal history and African American’s collective testimony of enslavement. Nona, thus, uses her body as an archive onto which her and her ancestor's experiences are recorded. Trained at the International Center of Photography, Nona received her MFA in 2013 from Bard College. Since then, Nona has gained widespread acclaim for her photographic work that examines the relationship between the black female body, memory, and place. Through self-portraiture, she reclaims sites in New York City where the history of slavery has been forgotten and summons those narratives into our present day. As monuments to Confederate generals and other racist relics of bygone eras are taken down across the nation, there is no better time to chat with Nona. Nona uses her nude or semi-nude body as a counter-monument to Confederate iconography and as a testament to the legacy of slavery that is literally enshrined in her physical person. I was a pleasure to chat with Nona about her upbringing in Brooklyn, the relationship between West Indians and African Americans, and learning to love her body as a full-figured woman.