PRINCETON, NJ.- Jordan Eagles: Centrifuge traces Eagles’s exploration of the visual power of blood and its use as an artistic medium and metaphor across sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Throughout his career, Eagles has worked with blood as a medium for exploring the human life cycle. Over the past decade, he has created a compelling body of work using human blood—voluntarily donated by individuals from the LGBTQI+ community—to inspire dialogue about the effects of identity-based policies for blood donation and thus about wider questions of identity and personhood. The exhibition is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art@Bainbridge gallery until March 15, 2026.
The artworks in Centrifuge were created both before and after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised their guidelines to eliminate questions about a prospective donor’s gender and sexual orientation, a change that took effect in 2023. The works incorporate human blood paired with American pop-culture ephemera and historical documents to create multiple points of entry into these conversations, and to challenge discrimination against and the stigmatization of LGBTQI+ individuals and people living with HIV. Galleries highlight distinct projects or chapters from Eagles’s ongoing body of work, inviting reflection on blood as a lifesaving, sustaining, and unifying human element, and on the ways that policies rooted in identity and bias can fracture that bond.
“Across his practice, Jordan Eagles finds powerful ways to invite us to question how discrimination and bias erode the most basic of our shared human experiences,” said Chris Newth, senior associate director for collections and exhibitions at the Princeton University Art Museum. “Though the FDA’s blood-donation guidelines have been revised to be based more on behavior than on identity, Eagles’s work asks viewers to consider how policies of bias can still divide humans from each other today.”
The exhibition begins with photographs of men in states of tender embrace; the artist projects blood patterns onto their naked skin. These photographs both evoke deep intimacy and summon the historical legacy of HIV/AIDS by recalling the stigmatized imagery of rashes, lesions, and same-sex touch prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition continues with Eagles reimagining traditional symbols of masculinity and heroism—from World War II blood drives to legendary superheroes—in images that confront historical scientific bias and cultural narratives about who is worthy of care. Moving into his more recent practice, a series of AI-generated videos, sculpture, and photography explore how artificial intelligence can reflect, reinforce, or challenge societal bias as it relates to the FDA’s blood-donation policies and wider questions of identity. The exhibition culminates with a series derived from Salvator Mundi—a painting of Jesus Christ as “savior of the world” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that fetched $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting. These works mark an interrogation of how value can be assigned to something such as blood, an element we all share.
“The works in Centrifuge inspire questions about whose blood, bodies, and lives are valued, especially queer bodies,” says artist Jordan Eagles. “As we live through the unraveling of the healthcare system, assaults on higher education, and the stigmatization of science, this exhibition can serve as an examination of policies and conventions that divide us despite our shared humanity.”
Jordan Eagles: Centrifuge is organized and presented by the Princeton University Art Museum.
