PUBLIC POOL presents His Cum Tastes Like Caviar: Brooklyn, NY

Public Pool is excited to announce His Cum Taste Like Caviar, a solo exhibition of Jeffrey Hargrave’s drawings, paintings, and sketchbooks, presenting an intimate visual diary of Hargrave’s inner world.

Jeffrey Hargrave’s art practice involves reimagining the canon of art history in the context of sexuality, identity, and today's fraught racial divides. Colorful, feverish, and challenging at times, his paintings surprise and provoke the eye's expectations by subverting revered classics - familiar to us but joyously reconstituted through a queer African-American lens. The result is dramatic and highly personal, reflecting Hargrave's own life's struggles to find any semblance of himself in the legendary pinnacles of Western art.

Hargrave addresses pressing societal issues using intimate and humorous vehicles through his paper works, recycled household objects, and midsized canvases. In some, he deconstructs the oeuvres of such modern masters as Matisse, Modigliani, Manet, Warhol, and their ilk, and includes familiar and unfamiliar representations of blackness that at times charm, at times disturb. In additional pieces, themes of pleasure, desire, and urban lifestyle are portrayed in Ukiyo-e styled works on paper and canvas, constructing scenes of fantasy adorned with characters frequently employed in the artist's visual language. Hargrave often subverts the historical minstrel depictions of African Americans, deconstructing and reimagining these stereotypes in a tongue-in-cheek manner that confronts, satirizes, and empowers, reclaiming narratives that have long been steeped in derogatory portrayals. 

Hargrave's exploration extends to his thought-provoking works on paper, where intimate diary musings on life, death, and childhood trauma converge with daring statements such as "His Cum Taste Like Caviar." Through this narrative, Hargrave challenges conventional norms and societal expectations, weaving personal reflections alongside provocative declarations, inviting viewers into a realm that blurs the boundaries between private thoughts and public discourse. 

Hargrave's work speaks to the world but through a visual language deconstructed and reshaped by the artist's emotional experience of isolation and yearning for identity, as he taps into his memories of growing up amid a sharply divided community. Hargrave translates his personal experiences into playful, yet biting images that mix art-history clichés and racial stereotypes, asking the viewer to consider what is missing from the historical picture. Ultimately, the artist seeks to engage viewers in a dialogue on class, religion, sexuality, racial identity, and privilege based on a repertoire of familiar images. 

Hargrave attended the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His works have been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and other prestigious venues. This show follows a recent solo exhibition titled Black Olympia at Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York.

This marks Public Pool’s second exhibition at Founder’s Lab in collaboration with Preview Events. Special thanks to everyone involved.