Strange Fruit
In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work "Strange Fruit", an installation of various fruit skins (oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons) that Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread. "Strange Fruit" grew out of a deeply personal response to the losses of the AIDS epidemic and as a meditation on mourning, it became a seminal work of the 1990s. "Strange Fruit" was exhibited in 1998 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it currently resides.