Sanford Biggers' "Blossoms" at the Brooklyn Museum

Sanford Biggers' player-piano installation

In early 2012, the Brooklyn Museum held a major one-man show by the artist Sanford Biggers in the 5th floor atrium gallery. The centerpiece was a player piano playing the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," which was once song by Billie Holiday. The piece was called "Blossoms"(2007) and had a tree that went up for at least 20 feet, growing up through the piano. The song played on a continuous loop. I took my then-8-year-old daughter Sophie to the exhibit, and she asked me what the meaning of lynching was. It is an upsetting thing to explain to a child that many young black men (and the occasional woman) were murdered by mobs in the South throughout the 20th century.

Unfortunately, race is a wound in America that is nowhere near healed, no matter what the Supreme Court says.

The piano and tree were centered a a perfect circle of real dirt that the poor guard had to maintain when people stepped in the dirt and kicked it around.

Biggers' "Blossoms" is still at the museum, this time on the ground floor. A guard informed a visitor that "Strange Fruit" would play on the piano every half hour.

 "Blossoms" is much less grand this time around, and almost seems like an afterthought.  It is penned in too tight, but if you take a few minutes and meditate on the installation, some of its power comes back. "Blossoms" was made with Mr. Biggers genius, as well as wood, epoxy and the blood of hundreds of murdered African Americans over the last century.

 --Dylan Foley