Statue of BLM protester doesn’t stay up for long
LONDON — Jen Reid, the Black Lives Matter protester whose statue was erected in place of a toppled slave trader in Bristol, England, on Wednesday, said just before the unauthorized installation that she did not know whether the city’s authorities would let it stand there for a few months or a single day.
It turned out to be the latter. Workers removed the resinand-steel statue of Reid at dawn Thursday, 24 hours after it was put up, bringing a swift curtain down on an act of guerrilla art that attracted widespread attention but did not impress city leaders.
“I understand people want expression, but the statue has been put up without permission,” Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees said in a post on Twitter on Wednesday, soon after the figure was installed. “Anything put on the plinth outside of the process we’ve put in place will have to be removed.”
“The people of Bristol will decide its future,” Rees added of the plinth, or statue base, where 17thcentury slave trader Edward Colston
stood before being toppled by protesters last month and thrown into the nearby harbor.
The City Council said it would hold the statue of Reid, by sculptor Marc Quinn, at a local museum for him “to collect or donate to our collection.” Quinn, who created the sculpture in a few weeks after seeing a photograph of Reid standing on the base during a protest, did not have an immediate response.
In an interview earlier, Quinn said he did not expect Bristol to leave the statue, titled “A Surge of Power ( Jen Reid),” in place permanently, though he hoped it would be there long enough to provoke a conversation about “how we commemorate people in statues.” He called it a “temporary sentence in the conversation.”
Reid, a fashion stylist, climbed on the base during a Black Lives Matter demonstration after the crowd pulled down the bronze statue of Colston, which had stood in the city since 1895, rolled it down the street and dumped it in the harbor. Her pose, with her right arm thrust upward in a defiant gesture, inspired Quinn after he saw a picture of it on social media.