I Am Queen Mary is a 23-foot-tall sitting statue of Queen Mary Thomas, which stands outside the former West-Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen’s port. This warehouse once stored colonial products made by black slaves and now reserves replicas of sculptures of white men.
The statue is a shared creation of two talented black artists from two sides of the globe connected by Denmark colonial history- the Danish visual artist Jeannette Ehlers and the Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle.
Queen Mary was one of the leaders of the 1878 rebellion in St. Croix Island against the Danish Government, fighting for improved conditions for the plantations’ workers. She was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment in a women’s prison in Copenhagen but a few years later returned to the island to complete her punishment there.
The artist, Jeannette Ehlers, was born to a Danish mother and Caribbean father, launched this project to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the sale of the former Danish colony to the US with a memorial honoring Queen Mary and bringing Denmark a statue of a black woman for the first time.
The statue was dedicated on March 31, 2018. It depicts Queen Mary sitting in a rattan chair, a torch in one hand and a cane knife in the other hand. She is barefooted, gazing forward, determined, and strong. No one can ignore her presence and this brings HerStory back to life.
Another statue of Queen Mary commemorates her with her fellow leaders, the Three Queens Statue stands on Saint Thomas Island, since 2005. More about it, here.
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