Flack's Statue Assailed As Racist

The sculptor Audrey Flack is no stranger to controversy, but the storm that has broken over her head in the past few months far eclipses any of your workaday art-world tempests.

The monumental "Catherine of Braganza" she has been working on since 1992, a six-story statue of a Portuguese princess who married an English king and became the namesake of the borough of Queens, is under mounting attack as "a racist symbol of slavery" - as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it not long ago.

As the time nears for the bronze statue to ascend its pedestal on the Queens side of the East River, the centerpiece of a planned commercial renaissance at Hunters Point, the Committee Against Queen Catherine is demanding it be scrapped.

Queen Under Attack

In the past month, Ms. Flack - whose work is in the collections of every major museum in Manhattan despite the critic John Russell's 1983 characterization of her Photorealist paintings as "irredeemably hideous" - has found herself several times on television, defending Catherine against charges that the Queen profited, even if indirectly, from the slave trade.

The statue's opponents, a coalition of African American neighbors supported by politicians and academics, maintain that the 17th-century queen "cannot be disconnected from her father and husband."

Slavery, they note, was the source of the Portuguese royal family's wealth, and England's King Charles II was also a "promoter" of the trade.

Slavery Enshrined

"To salute a slave mistress is tantamount to spitting in the face of everyone in Queens and everybody in New York," Mr. Sharpton declared in August. He has not spoken out publicly on the matter since losing to Ruth Messinger in the city's Democratic mayoral primary, but others have since joined the fray.

"At this time, when there are discussions about apologies for slavery, to bring this into the face of black people is unthinkable," said Betty Dobson of the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People, an ad hoc group based in South Ozone Park, at the time. "We're not going to have this thing foisted upon us at this time of our lives."

"It's one thing to teach the past, but we should be beyond enshrining the wrong history," a Long Island University professor, Jeffrey Kroess ler, said on Nov. 11 on the steps of Queens Borough Hall.

Art Politicized

Mr. Kroessler, a historian who teaches at L.I.U.'s Brooklyn campus, has also attacked the statue as anti-feminist, pointing out that Catherine's dowry included Bombay.

"Is that an ideal of womanhood we wish to hold up to our youth?" he asked - an ironic question, surely, for the statue's staunchly feminist creator, who once told a rally to defend battered women that Medusa was a victim of male violence.

Ms. Flack sees the escalating controversy as "the politicizing of art," she said on Saturday. The sculptor called Catherine "a true symbol of the U.S. melting pot, certainly for women."

Caring And Tolerant

"I wanted it to look like her, yet relate to large numbers of people," she said. "She doesn't look Caucasian. She has very full, sensual lips." Catherine is said to have had olive skin.

"She survived in treacherous times," Ms. Flack continued. "She was intelligent, strong, attractive - a role model, and also an image of healing, not of violence."

And, said the sculptor, the Queen, whose royal husband had at least 14 children by a lifelong procession of mistresses, was "a good, sweet, caring, tolerant woman" to boot.

New Evidence

The Friends of Queen Catherine, the nonprofit group of Portuguese and Portuguese-American citizens and institutions that commissioned the $1 million monument, has begun fighting back against the charges that she condoned slavery.

The group was bolstered recently by as-yet-unpublicized testimony from a University of North Carolina scholar that Catherine of Braganza, far from acquiescing to the practice, seems to have opposed it.

In a letter to the Director of Cultural Affairs of the Borough of Queens, Aida Gonzalez-Jarrin, Frank T. Melton, a specialist in 17th-century England and the author of many books and articles on Catherine and her court, wrote on Nov. 12 that he could find "no evidence that she owned slaves or that there were slaves at her court."

To Free Slaves

In fact, according to Mr. Melton, Catherine actually left money in her will to free slaves, directing that "Little Boys or Girls shall be the first which shall be redeemed, and if there be none, the women shall have the preference of the men, for that in this manner the remedy may be applied where there is the most danger. . . ."

"There is a positive aspect" to the attack on the statue, said Manuel Andrade e Sousa, the founder and president of the pro-Catherine committee. "Support has grown."

"The Portuguese community in Jamaica is much more active" on the monument's behalf, he said, since the challenge to the monument began. Mr. Sousa has characterized the charges of the Committee Against Queen Catherine as "ridiculous."

Centennial Unveiling

The statue, which will be the second-tallest in New York City, next to the Statue of Liberty, is "about to go into mold" at the foundry in Beacon, N.Y., where Ms. Flack has been working since 1992.

The plan is to unveil it next year, as part of centennial celebrations marking the consolidation of the five boroughs into New York City.

"Catherine will come floating down the Hudson, trailed by a flotilla of small boats and, perhaps, Portuguese sailing ships," said Ms. Flack.

What The Globe Means

The statue is shown holding a globe, or "orb," which Mr. Kroessler, the L.I.U. historian, regards as a symbol of all that he finds wrong with it.

"When a royal figure holds an orb," he wrote in a Newsday essay, "it suggests not multiculturalism, but a divinely sanctioned claim to territories and peoples as personal property."

Ms. Flack strongly disagrees. For her, the globe symbolizes the connection between the Old World and the New.

"You can look up at a cloud and see an angel," she said, "or you could look at the same cloud and see a slave ship. What did the person see who smashed Michelangelo's 'Pieta'?"

"You can read into art whatever you want."