The statue is an allegorical portrait of Mary Thomas, known as Queen Mary, an enslaved woman who worked on a sugar cane planation in the Danish West Indies (now Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands). She led the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial…
Originally created in 1913 for the National Emancipation Exposition in New York City, the multi-figure sculpture is anchored around a truncated tree that reaches over the heads of the three human figures. The tree is roughly realized, and Fuller’s…