‘Strange Fruit’ exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art preserves a message of decay

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.”

But art it was. And Temkin, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acquired the piece for the PMA in 1998. The last time Strange Fruit appeared in public in Philadelphia was more than 20 years ago. (It was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2018, part of a major Leonard retrospective.)

At the end of July, however, the piece came out of storage and was publicly installed in the museum’s new contemporary galleries, where it will remain for about a year, evoking memories of the many lives lost to AIDS and the cold government response to the public health crisis in the 1980s. It should come as no surprise that Strange Fruit is dedicated to Leonard’s friend David Wojnarowicz, fellow artist and fierce AIDS activist, who died from the disease in 1992.

Reemerging in the midst of another pandemic, Strange Fruit evokes reflective memories of those already lost and raises unsettling questions about time and mutability and the purpose of a museum — that impermanent temple of cultural permanence and stability.

Strange Fruit is intended to decay, although it didn’t start out that way. Leonard consulted over the course of several years with her friend, the preservation expert Christian Scheidemann, known for his wizardlike conservation talents applied to everything from doughnuts to liverwurst.

Scheidemann came up with a freeze-drying technique that would have suspended decay in the pieces of Strange Fruit virtually forever.

At that moment, however, Leonard realized that her work was intended to decay. It was, in fact, “the whole process” of searching for and finding “the ideal method of preservation for this piece that made it clear to me that the very meaning of the piece would be undermined by preserving it,” Leonard said at a panel at the Whitney Museum a few years ago.

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For one thing, permanence is an illusion, and time itself moves along at different rates: A flower lives and wilts, a fruit rots, a person dies, a building crumbles, all spanning different periods of time at the same time.

“The organic process of living isn’t always trackable in a completely linear way,” she said, “because of the existence of memories, false memories, histories, known histories, experiences, the way that we sort of layer time and experience it multiply.”

Strange Fruit began as an introspective, personal healing process that became artwork meant to decay and return to nothingness, which, of course, is what happens to everything eventually, even temples of cultural permanence — despite illusions of immutability and eternity.

But museums don’t see themselves as places where art goes to rot.

Kate Cuffari, associate conservator at the museum, noted that the “artwork didn’t join the collection as a bunch of fruits that have been invisibly consolidated with a plastic resin” to retard change. “Instead, they are essentially fruits,” Cuffari said, with the stitching materials — metal zippers, plastic buttons, metallic thread — that the artist used to bind the skins and peels.

“For the museum, we are aiming to display it well, so that it represents itself well, and store it well,” said Cuffari. “And because there is a very stable environment in terms of temperature and relative humidity in our galleries and in our store rooms, we don’t anticipate we would see a kind of a rapid arc of change in the fruits when they’re on display or when they’re in storage. … They’re not going to rot. We expect they will potentially get darker over time. The fruit peels might become more brittle over time.”

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The pieces are already desiccated — Leonard dried the skins before working on them in the 1990s — and they are inflexible and becoming more prone to breakage over a “long arc of time,” said Cuffari. The greatest danger and challenge comes from potential insect infestation. No signs of that over the last 20 years, however, she said.

Amanda Sroka, associate curator of contemporary art, says all art is ultimately impermanent but that different works of art function in different temporal frameworks. In a sense, Strange Fruit is a kind of performance, a witness to its own slow vanishing.

That means the issue for the museum becomes administrative, like running a hospital. Every patient is different.

“How does one manage decay?” Sroka said. “And our own decay, that visceral quality? As time passes, our bodies change. We change. We change as objects in the world.”

Sroka added that Leonard was excited by “the possibility of this work living in an encyclopedic museum.“ For one thing, Strange Fruit represents a “kind of homage to the tradition of memento mori painting.”

“I was just up in the European painting galleries, and there are these wonderful new still life paintings, new to the galleries, just installed,” Sroka said during a recent interview in the Strange Fruit gallery, a field of dry fruit laid across the floor before her.

“And so it’s this wonderful way of thinking about that tradition of including a fruit or a flower as a direct reference to the fragility of life, and here Leonard brings that into this work that’s literally meant to decay before your eye. So, yeah, it would seem that for an institution that is known for the preservation of objects in their care and condition, to have a work that inevitably will just decay — that’s part of the conceptual nature of the work.”