Bases Loaded (2026)
Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY
Curated by Gabriel Florenz
Bases Loaded is an exhibition by Jordan Eagles that uses baseball, a sport long mythologized as “America’s pastime,” to examine ideas of team, identity, and belonging in contemporary American culture. Since the late 1990s, Eagles has explored the aesthetic power and ethical stakes of blood as a core material. Across installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, this exhibition addresses the rhetoric of blood and the contradictions within biased policies.
A lifelong New York Mets fan, Eagles was struck by the slogan emblazoned on T‐shirts given to blood donors at Citi Field: “Mets are in our blood.” While his love of the team was inherited from his family, he and many from the LGBTQI+ community are barred from participating in these blood drives because of long‐standing biased policies. The phrase became a prompt for him: What is in our blood, and who is allowed to belong to a team, a family, a nation?
For Bases Loaded, Eagles sourced these giveaway T‐shirts, cropped them, and splattered each with blood drawn from an HIV‐positive gay man, confronting ongoing prejudice against queer bodies and HIV stigma. Grouped by color in formations that echo offensive and defensive teams on a baseball diamond, the shirts also evoke the division of the United States into “red” and “blue” camps, underscoring how seemingly neutral fandom is entangled with politics and identity.
Alongside the shirts is a series of nine resin sculptures shaped like home plates, some of which include blood from the artist, his father, and a close friend. Embedded with family photographs, blood collection tubes, and medical protective gear, these works embody male intimacy and familial ties. Nearby, altered reproductions of New York Post covers about Mets star Mike Piazza’s sexuality and the “Blood Feud” between rival teams expose how media spectacle constructs and distorts masculinity, stokes tribal allegiance, and sustains rumor. Taken together, these works complicate the supposed neutrality of team sports, revealing how belonging and exclusion are culturally inscribed, sometimes quite literally, in blood.