Queen Catherine

In the early 1990s, a group called Friends of Queen Catherine commissioned New York-based artist Audrey Flack to create a monumental bronze statue of Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese-born wife of British ruler Charles II in whose honor the borough of Queens is named. The statue, which would have been roughly the height of a nine-story building, was meant to be installed on the East River shore in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City, across from the United Nations.

Protesters in the mid to late 1990s, however, objected to celebrating a figure they argued had materially benefited from the transatlantic slave trade. Among the dissenters was Rev. Al Sharpton, who sharply decried the project: “To salute a slave mistress is tantamount to spitting in the face of everyone in Queens and everybody in New York.” Still others objected to the statue of a relatively unimportant royal figure overlooking a Revolutionary War battleground. Though the statue never came to be, Flack remained dedicated to the project and defended its merits, noting that she endeavored to depict Catherine as biracial, reflecting her Portuguese background and paying homage to the ethnic diversity of the borough of Queens.