Can You Save Superman? A new queer Virtual Art Exhibit at the Leslie-Lohman Museum

We can always rely on NY’s epicenter for queer art the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art to mount an excellent Exhibit that reflects hot button issues of our community. And their current Virtual one is no different.

This new powerful show from NY artist Jordan Eagles who preserves blood and through his invented process, he encases, layers and suspends the blood. In this Exhibit his work challenges the decades-old outdated policy that still bars gay and bisexual men from donating blood even in the time of COVID-19.

For Can You Save Superman? Eagles uses found images from an actual Superman comic book from 1971 entitled Attack of the Micro-Murderer. Involving heavy doses of time travel, an evil alien taking over a villain’s body to enact mayhem and the infection of Superman by a futuristic super-virus, the feel-good component of the comic features a mass call to the citizens of Metropolis to donate blood to save Superman’s life.

Sadly, the transfusion is unsuccessful, but Superman later recovers after tricking the alien to infect an android stand-in, thus ridding his own corpus of the deadly bug. Eagles uses the cover of the comic in the work at hand, splashing the blood of a gay man on PrEP as though projected onto the image. It is his way of drawing attention to the “gay blood” ban and to get us thinking about the inequalities that persist in the United States and our medical legislation, guidelines and policies.

The Exhibit, curated by Eric Shiner, the executive director of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn very pointedly runs from World Blood Donor Day (June 14, 2020) through World AIDS Day (December 1, 2020)

Click HERE to get  the Virtual Tour