PHILADELPHIA -- "Strange Fruit" is arrayed across the floor of a small gallery in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a total of 295 bananas, oranges, grapefruits, lemons, and avocados created — consumed, actually — by artist Zoe Leonard as the AIDS epidemic intensified in the 1990s with no lifesaving treatment available.
Leonard ate the fruit and then dried the skins and stitched the pieces back together, repairing the bodies now laid out on the floor of the PMA more than 20 years later, like gravestones marking the gray cement.
“It was sort of a way to sew myself back up,” Leonard once remarked, according to Ann Temkin, a former curator at the PMA. “I didn’t even realize I was making art when I started doing them.”
