The Lodge Gallery. | Totally Gay for Sports (TGFS).

Last week saw the premiere of Totally Gay for Sports (TGF Sports). Curated by Pittsburgh native Paul Brainard, the group show features sport inspired pieces by Evie Falci, Jean-Pierre Roy, Hyunjin Alex Park, Eric White, Dawn Frasch, Peter Daverington and more. With ‘TGF Sports’ emblazoned across the wall, The Lodge Gallery was packed to the rafters for a night of beer, Gatorade, and athletic artwork.

Upon entering The Lodge, you could sense that Brainard, who happens to be straight, had a satirical agenda in mind when he curated these works. We took some time to speak to Brainard about the exhibition and he had this to say:

“I came up with the idea for Totally Gay for Sports because I felt that in a sentence it articulated a current state of American culture–which is sports mania and an obsession with gay culture.

There is a whole repressed element of sexuality in the United States and that lends itself very much to not be accepting of sexuality, first of all, and then second of all, not being accepting of someone’s choice to be gay or someone’s natural disposition to be gay.

And because of that there are men watching sports or doing whatever they can to avoid self actualizing. In a lot of cultures actually… there are a lot of dudes who watch sports all over the world or just do something to become not what they should be.”

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TGF Sports will be on display at The Lodge Gallery (131 Chrystie Street) through January 12th 2014. Be sure to it check out! In the meantime, check out some snapshots from our Editor in Chief Akeem K. Duncan.