I live on an island that was originally called Ay-Ay by its first inhabitants but was renamed Santa Cruz by Christopher Columbus and then again renamed Saint Croix by the French. We, however, pronounce it like the English, who, along with six other nations, claimed us at one point or another and sometimes at the same time.
La Vaughn Belle’s artist studio in the Free Gut area of Christiansted, St. Croix, after renovation in 2016; Photo: Tamia Williams
The French were the first to build lasting structures, and when the Danes purchased the island, they overlaid “Christiansted” on the French town of Le Bassin, making it the capital of the Danish West Indies. They later created other towns, also to be named after Danish royalty, Frederiksted and Charlotte Amalie, the first located on the western end of Saint Croix and the latter a port town on the island of Saint Thomas.
I work in Christiansted, a town laid out on a grid with many public buildings on its waterfront integral to the colonial project: a fort equipped with cannons and dungeons, a scale house, a customs house, and a chapel (of course). With many of these buildings now federalized, as part of the United States National Parks system, there are some elements that are now gone—like the slave auction block—or removed from public view—like the whipping post. Despite attempts to erase some of these painful components, history leaves scars.
Looking at the Danish building codes of 1747, there are traces of how race became atomized into everything. The forbiddance of thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub structures often used at the time in West Africa was not just about the fear of fire and a quest for less combustible materials. The attempt to corral the free Black population into a specific area of town named Neger Gotted (later to be known as Free Gut) had no non-racialized cover. It, too, was about social control. Many of the wooden cottages that the formerly unfree built still stand today. However, since some are abandoned and derelict, they are susceptible to fire yet again. As their transient occupants are often addicted to illicit drugs, fires can occur as a result of careless stupors.
My artist studio was one of those abandoned cottages. It, too, had been neglectfully burned and then degraded to another, deeper form of abandonment, the kind that slips into invisibility, as can also happen with people. Located in the Free Gut on the western end of East Street, the property transformed my art practice.
“The House That Freedoms Built” is an edited excerpt from the essay “The Alchemy of Creative Resistance,” originally published in Small Axe 23, no. 60 (November 2019); 119–30.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
La Vaughn Belle, Constructed Manumission, featured in the solo exhibition Ledgers from a Lost Kingdom at meter, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017; Credit: I Do Art Agency courtesy of meter space
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La Vaughn Belle