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Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn

Nona Faustine

Photography

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.
MEDIUM Chromogenic print
DATES 2016
DIMENSIONS sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm) image: 26 9/16 × 40 in. (67.5 × 101.6 cm)  (show scale)
COLLECTIONS Photography
ACCESSION NUMBER 2017.41c
CREDIT LINE Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Nona Faustine (American, born 1977). Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn, 2016. Chromogenic print, sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41c. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2017.41c_PS20.jpg)
IMAGE overall, 2017.41c_PS20.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2024
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT ©Nona Faustine Simmons
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Nona Faustine (American, born 1977). <em>Lobbying the Gods For A Miracle, Brooklyn</em>, 2016. Chromogenic print, sheet: 27 15/16 × 42 in. (71 × 106.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41c. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2017.41c_PS20.jpg)