Strange Fruit
Philadelphia Art Museum
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.
Philadelphia
Seen June 28, 2025
There’s a room in the back of the Philadelphia Art Museum where fruit has been left to rot.
Past hallways of classic cornucopia still lifes is the exhibit “Strange Fruit,” made up of 300-odd citrus peels, banana skins, and avocado rinds. They’re all sutured back together with thread, buttons, Dole stickers, zippers.
Scattered around the floor like unmarked graves, the leftovers are part of a transitory show set for inevitable expiration; one day, they will all turn to dust. Artist Zoe Leonard started the project in the 1990s amid the AIDS epidemic. As her friends died one by one from the virus, she took to stitching up fruit skins as a ritual for dealing with loss.
“I began sewing up banana skins and orange peels most mornings after breakfast. This act of repairing was helpful to me. The quiet, repetitive act of sewing was satisfying to me in some way I didn’t really understand. I didn’t think of this as making art at all,” Leonard wrote in an artist statement. “This act of fixing something broken, repairing the skin of something after the fruit of it is gone, strikes me as both pathetic and beautiful. At any rate, as intensely human.”
The title of the show is a reference to the poem “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and popularized through song by Billie Holiday. “Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees… Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/ For the rain to gather/ for the wind to suck/ For the sun to rot/ For the tree to drop/ Here is a strange bitter crop,” part of the poem goes.
The lines capture the inhumanity of lynchings in the early 20th century South. The through line here — between deaths by AIDS or lynching — is not the natural impermanence of all things, but the uncanny evil of human lives needlessly robbed. There is blood thirst underlying the spread of disease; whether in the case of HIV or pure hatred, our societal failure to tame prejudice is what caused so many avoidable deaths.
The poetry of “Strange Fruit” names how Black people have been seen and treated as less than human. Leonard’s artwork is an equally visceral approach to infusing humanity back into the horrific statistics of a mass epidemic. The peeled and put back together skins are porous, speckled, freckled and bruised. They’re reminiscent of the faces that once were, while eerily artificial and unrecognizable with the addition of threads and zippers that resemble lifeless smiles.
These alterations are like dressings — whether bandages or costumes, Leonard’s tailoring is an attempt to see personhood in lifeless remains. The project is also, as Leonard herself said, human in its effort to make sense of the senseless, to battle with answerless existential questions.
The ongoing decay embodied by Leonard’s exhibit is testimony to the reality that dehumanization has become part and parcel of society; the American healthcare system or ethnic cleansing in Gaza are two contemporary examples of how lives are chronically picked for unjust taking.
For those of us who are not targeted or otherwise made vulnerable due to our identity, the question becomes: How do we go on when terror reigns all around? We can organize; write poems and songs; sew and suture. But through “Strange Fruit,” Leonard confesses to the often fruitless tedium of fighting back while the world spoils.
