Queens Weighs Six Designs for a Billie Holiday Monument
A public monument to Billie Holiday is moving through its next stage in Queens, where city officials have released six finalist proposals for review. On May 19, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs made the designs public for the planned work outside the Jamaica Performing Arts Center, opening a feedback period that runs through the end of May. A selection panel is expected to choose the final design later this year.
The finalists are La Vaughn Belle, Nikesha Breeze, Nekisha Durrett, Tanda Francis, Thomas J. Price, and Tavares Strachan. All six were chosen after an open call in late 2025, then took part in a site visit and discussions with Holiday scholars and family members. The process suggests a monument shaped not only by artistic ambition, but by a careful effort to ground the project in the singer’s life and legacy.
The proposals vary widely in form and mood. Breeze’s Lady Sings the Truth: A Monument to Billie Holiday presents Holiday mid-performance, her hands clasped to her chest and white marble gardenias in her hair. Durrett’s Bending the Note uses white marble to trace Holiday’s profile, then opens the form to reveal a gold underside, with a rendering of her dog Pepe at the base. Strachan, known for a minimalist approach, offers Holiday’s silhouette as a white vessel he describes as a container for memory.
Price’s Held Within takes a different route, using two bronze forms resting against one another on a plinth. The British sculptor drew on a photograph of Holiday with a beloved dog, aiming for what he called a portrait of authentic joy. Belle’s proposal places a larger-than-life Holiday beside a reflecting pool in a quieter, pre-stage moment, while Francis’s Blood at the Root centers a large head crowned with gardenia petals that spiral into a pond lined with blood red tiles, a reference to “Strange Fruit.”
The monument is being funded through Percent for Art, the city program that has required one percent of New York City construction budgets to go toward public artworks since 1982. Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan, moved from Baltimore to New York City in the late 1920s, and Queens was described as an on-and-off home for her in the 1950s. Nantasha Williams, who represents New York’s 27th district, said in a statement that honoring Holiday in Queens, where she lived, performed, and contributed to the borough’s cultural life, would create a lasting landmark for residents and visitors alike.
The final choice will determine not only the monument’s form, but how one of the 20th century’s most resonant voices is translated into public space.
