If you go down two flights of stairs in the A&A, walk past the vending machine, turn left after the double doors and continue down the hall, you’ll come face-to-face with Billie Holiday.
She’s resplendent. In a 24” x 36” poster, Holiday looks at you with a grin. It’s Feb. 25, 1959, and Holiday is in her dressing room before performing on the T.V. show Chelsey at 9. Her silver-blue dress will glitter under the spotlights. At 44, her voice is still singular, a rich tone with a growl in her lower register. Holiday’s music is defiant and unapologetic.
Often representing her own life through her lyrics, no topic is off limits. She’s earnest in discussing love, hate, sex, abuse, pain and joy. In a few hours, she’ll bear it all onstage. Though she doesn’t know it yet, this will be her last T.V. performance. In four months, she’ll die of heart failure, cuffed to a hospital bed by the New York City police. She was arrested on her deathbed for possession of narcotics.
This performance is special. Around twenty years earlier, in the late 1930s, Holiday was performing in New York jazz clubs. At one such venue, Café Society, she was introduced to the poem Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol. The poem tells the story of a lynching. It compares burned black bodies to strange fruit plucked by birds and rotted by the sun. With Holiday’s voice, it’s a song of violence and grotesque beauty. It’s a searing protest song. The only video recording of Holiday singing Strange Fruit is her performance on Chelsea at 9.
At King’s, this poster is significant. It’s the only art representing a person of colour on the walls of the school.
Why is this performance immortalized on a poster in the basement of King’s? How did it get there?
On July 18, 2000, Stardust Records released a CD, Billie Holiday Anthology 1944-1959. On the back of the CD, along with the tracklist, is the dressing room photo. To promote the CD, Stardust produced a run of posters.
Gerry Smith, the King’s bursar 20 years ago, bought posters in bulk to adorn Kings’ hallways. They consist mostly of French Impressionists. Holiday’s image was acquired around this same time.
In 2011, Smith was fired from King’s due to “financial mismanagement,” with rumours of possible embezzlement. In 2012, he was charged with sexual assault, accused of molesting a boy he had been paired with through a volunteer agency that provides mentors for children. The judge acquitted Smith in 2013 due to insufficient evidence.
Why does this matter?
Smith’s involvement in acquiring this painting does spark important questions about how art gets put onto the walls of King’s and whether more attention should be paid to its content. A famous Vermeer self-portrait, The Art of Painting, depicts the artist in the act of creation. It’s Vermeer at his best, with impressive perspective, composition and colour control. In 1940, the painting was owned by Adolf Hitler. Scholars of art history ask the question: does the past ownership of the painting affect our consideration of the painting itself?
In our case, Smith never owned the poster of Holiday. He didn’t commission the photo, and there’s no indication he even liked Holiday’s music. Justina Spencer, art historian and assistant professor at King’s, argues, “It’s a reproduction and a poster; we have to consider that it’s not an original work.” Smith’s inclusion in this saga then “adds a layer, a disturbing layer, to the history of this particular reproduction, but not necessarily to the original photograph of Billie Holiday,” Spencer says.
King’s has, over the years, made changes to what’s on the walls of the school. The boardroom on the second floor once displayed, as Bill Lahey, the university’s president, recalls, “uniformly colonialist” art. It was replaced. The dining hall used to display photos of all the past presidents. An endless row of white men (with two white women) to look at as you ate breakfast. Those were taken down in 2021. When asked directly, “Do you think it matters what is on the wall of an institution like King’s?” Lahey’s answer was unequivocal: “I think it matters a lot.” Yet, Holiday is the only person of colour represented on the walls of King’s.
When discussing diversity and inclusion on King’s campus, it’s also important to mention that King’s has been in the process of hiring an equity and diversity officer for the last year and a half. It has yet to find a person to fill the role permanently.
Strange Fruit
There was a protocol for when Holiday performed Strange Fruit at Café Society. She always performed it as the last number in her set. The house lights would go down, and the spotlight illuminated Holiday. The room would go still — all the wait staff retreated to the back of the room — and you’d be alone with her haunting voice. The injustice of it all crawls under your skin, and the discomfort settles there. At the last word — the snap of the word “crop” — the room would go black. When the house lights came up, Holiday would be gone.
Nina Simone, a fellow singer, would later comment: “That’s the ugliest song I’ve ever heard. Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country.” Like all good art, Strange Fruit confronts. It demands consideration — it asks you to consider beauty, destruction, and how you fit in the middle. As a protest song, it requires you to evaluate your role in the world and your impact.
These are the types of questions that art on the walls of King’s should invoke. This school can do better than hallways filled with French impressionists, so ubiquitous they would be more appropriate in a doctor’s office or on a Wardroom coaster. The Holiday poster in the basement sparks important questions: Who decides what’s on the wall? Why are they there? And can we do better?
