“My Country” is a series of eight photo-based screenprints by Nona Faustine, made in collaboration with the New York print studio Two Palms. Trained as a photographer, Faustine garnered attention for her 2015 series “White Shoes” in which she poses in the nude – except for a pair of white high-heeled shoes – at sites that were once centers of the slave trade in New York City. Often censored for its explicit content, this series established Faustine as an artist with both a critical eye and a critical message.
Faustine continues her interrogation of historic sites in “My Country,” which begins with a photograph of the Statue of Liberty. Taken not long before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, through a window on the Staten Island Ferry, it illustrates the myopia of the American monumental landscape. “That black line [from the window frame] shows the current of history that runs through these monuments that is not being acknowledged,” Faustine said in a 2019 interview with Mekala Rajagopal. The distortions in these works metaphorically represents the Black bodies glaringly absent from our monumental landscape.
