NEW YORK, NY.- “Shadowboxing" at FreedmanArt in New York City joins the works of photographer Nona Faustine and painter Kit White in a tete-a-tete that grapples with history, national memory, landscape, racism, and violence. Faustine and White engage with American history in their respective practices, as well as their use of the photographic image to share distinct perspectives on a contested American landscape, both past and present.” -Excerpted from Bomb Magazine review, December 18, 2019 by Stephanie Goodalle

Kit White now comments: "Who would have known that under Faustine's images lay the powder keg that was about to blow, bringing with it a message that was right before everyone’s eyes, but unseen. One of Faustine's powerful photographs depicts the now doomed statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stands before the Museum of Natural History. Looking at that image now, the violation seems so obvious, but it took this moment to make us see. Faustine, however, saw it all along."

Faustine's words are as powerful, as are her images that speak to the moment where we have arrived: “America's skeletons tumbling out of her closet. Black dead bodies screaming for justice.” - Nona Faustine




Artist Statements:

Nona Faustine: Situated inside a photographic tradition while questioning the culture that bred that tradition, my practice walks the line between the past and the present. My work starts where intersecting identities meet history. Through the family album, and self-portraiture I explore the inherited legacy of trauma, lineage, and history. reconstructing a narrative of race, memory, and time that delve into stereotypes, folklore and anthropology. These are meditative reflections of a history Americans have not come to terms with, challenging the duality of what is both visible and invisible.

Kit White: The notion of the photograph as an after image and symbol led me back to the work of Matthew Brady and his fellow Civil War photographers whose images are so much a part of our historical memory of that conflict. It was one of if not the first wars ever captured as an analog image. Those images still remain potent and charged. They are a vivid reminder of the brutality and loss that occurred. And given the source of that conflict, the Civil War remains as pertinent now as it did one hundred and fifty years ago. It too is a wall, albeit a psychological one, that still separates us as a culture. And, because most of the photographs of the Civil War are so well known to us, they are internalized and inform our sense of history.

Nona Faustine was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is a graduate of The School of Visual Arts and The International Center of Photography at Bard College MFA program. Her work focuses on history, identity, representation, evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.

Kit White was born and raised in West Virginia. He is a graduate of Harvard University, A.B. Fine Arts, Cum Laude. Kit White's first solo exhibition was with Betty Parsons at Parsons/Dreyfuss Gallery in 1977. Also, his work is the subject of a monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Line Into Form, published in 2015. On growing up in the South, Kit comments on his family home: “Our house was a hospital during the war, first for the South, then for the North when a Union army of 5,000 was encamped on the farm for a period of time. Physical relics were everywhere and, of course, stories were as well.”