Ulysses Davis started carving around 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. He owned and operated a barbershop in Savannah, Georgia, that also became the studio for his woodcarvings. Davis’s best-known work is a series of presidential busts, but he was also interested in religious and historical subjects. Using hardwoods, handmade tools, and a pocketknife, Davis created approximately three hundred sculptures that he used to spark dialogues among his customers, as men of many generations gathered in his barbershop. Strange Fruits is more fantastical than many other works by Davis. It strongly recalls African reliquary sculpture in its form and representation. The rosebud that decorates the central element was for the artist a symbol of love, yet the title is a reference to a 1937 poem by Abel Meeropol that was transformed into a civil rights protest song by Lewis Allen and first sung by Billie Holiday in 1939:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Strange Fruits, then, is a mixed metaphor, a testament to ancestral pride, human dignity, love, and endurance.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Strange Fruits," exhibition label for Jubilation|Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2012.