Fast forward to March 31, 2018, when the Virgin Islands’ artist La Vaughn Belle and the Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers revealed their groundbreaking monument I Am Queen Mary on the harbor front in Copenhagen. Their sculpture, and the global press frenzy generated, with headlines such as, “Denmark Unveils its First Public Monument to a Black Woman”, places the Prime Minister’s words into a welcome critical perspective.
The placement of a seven-meter-high statue of a Black woman in public space has rightfully been characterized as a landmark event, not only in Denmark but internationally. In light of the talk of “shared heroes”, the fact that the Danish press has spent a majority of their editorial space explaining who the historical figure of Mary Leticia Thomas is, and what the 1878 Fireburn labor revolt on St. Croix was all about, clearly suggest that this has been a heroine unknown to most Danes. The only reason that Danes are now urged to familiarize themselves with Queen Mary is due to the laborious work of two artists who has pushed this monument into the public sphere.
With a commanding height, I Am Queen Mary sits directly in front of the Danish West India warehouse on the harbor front in Copenhagen, a building which once stored goods from the enslavement trade. Just four hundred meters from the Royal Danish Family’s palace, Amalienborg, this Black Queen sits in a state of repose on a throne-like wicker peacock chair, which rests on 2 tons of corals shipped from St. Croix constructed to resemble a plinth and adorned with a plaque that simply reads “I Am Queen Mary: A Hybrid of Bodies, Nations and Narratives”. Her physical positioning not only gives emphasis to the warehouse’s function in the history of slavery. She also turns her back against the royal notion of Queendom in Denmark, and the white canon of European art history represented by the Royal Cast Collections housed today in the warehouse.
I Am Queen Mary is not simply an audacious monument, her audacity can also be read as a challenge to traditions of monumentality. Except for the name Queen Mary in the monument’s title, no textual description explains which historical figure the statue refers to. Her silent presence can be seen as a comment on the gendered privileging of monumental existences in public space in Denmark.