Two Finalists for the Billie Holiday Monument, Queens

Tuesday. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs released the two finalists for a planned public monument to Billie Holiday in Queens. Thomas J. Price, British sculptor, and Tavares Strachan, Bahamian conceptual artist. The shortlist narrows from fifteen original proposals submitted last year.

The monument will sit in Queens Plaza, a traffic triangle where Queens Boulevard meets the Queensboro Bridge approach. A site chosen for its proximity to the Addisleigh Park neighborhood in St. Albans, where Holiday lived from 1943 to 1949. The house still stands at 179-07 Sayres Avenue. Not landmarked, not marked with a plaque until 2019.

The two proposals

Price's work leans toward figurative bronze at civic scale. His Reaching Out (2019), a seven-meter bronze figure installed in Birmingham's Centenary Square, holds a similar scale ambition. Strachan works in installation and conceptual gesture. His The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), shown at the 2018 Berlin Biennale, archived objects and moments erased from cultural memory. Both artists submitted designs; the city has not released renderings.

The final selection lands later this year. The monument is funded through the city's Percent for Art program, which allocates one percent of eligible capital project budgets to public art. Budget figure not disclosed. Construction timeline not set.

The longer gap

Holiday died in 1959. This is the first city-funded monument to her in New York. A portrait by Robert Oakley now hangs in the Metropolitan Opera House lobby, commissioned in 2023. A street co-naming at West 133rd and Seventh Avenue in Harlem went up in 2015. No full monument until now.

Queens Plaza sees 40,000 pedestrians daily, mostly commuters off the E, M, and R trains. The site is open, flat, and loud. A monument here works against the quiet of Addisleigh Park, where Holiday recorded some of her clearest vocal takes between 1944 and 1947. The city chose visibility over resonance.