“Southern trees bear strange fruit,” sings Billie Holiday at the beginning of her incendiary 1939 protest anthem, Strange Fruit. The first New York solo exhibition of work by Charles Gaines, “Southern Trees,” pays homage to that song. Gaines, a seminal figure in the field of conceptual art, builds on a decades-long creative exploration of trees, numbers, and the triptych form in his latest series. The artist traveled to the Boone Hall Plantation—just outside his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina—to photograph its 150-year-old pecan trees. In his triptych style, the black-and-white photograph of a single pecan tree is displayed alongside a black ink sketch and a numerical watercolor representation of the original image. This style of copying, plotting, and layering has served Gaines well over the years. He says that while “the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.” —Paulina Prosnitz