Bad at Sports

At NADA Miami, Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, Tom Sandford and returning guest William Powhida dig into the art world's annual power rituals, the shifting geography of cultural influence, Gulf-state biennials, wealth concentration, and the contradictions of contemporary art's relationship to capitalism. Starting from Powhida's commissioned work for the annual ArtReview Power 100 issue, the conversation encompasses discussions of oligarchy, philanthropy, redistribution, art fairs, nationalism, soft power, artist-run infrastructure, and Powhida's ambitious experimental project, the Zero Art Fair.   William Powhida — https://williampowhida.com/NADA Miami — https://www.newartdealers.org/ ArtReview Power 100 — https://artreview.com/power-100/ Ben Davis — https://www.benadavis.com/ Art Angle Podcast —Art Angle Podcast Nicole Eisenman —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Eisenman 52 Walker — https://52walker.com/Zero Art Fair — https://zeroartfair.com/Flag Art Foundation — https://www.flagartfoundation.org/

Bad at Sports Episode 947: Justin H. Long Live from the fair circuit heat (not Miami… but spiritually always Miami), Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, and Tom Sanford catch up with artist Justin H. Long, self-described "original Florida man," to talk boats, comedy, identity, and the strange poetics of nautical culture. Long's sculptural practice moves between deadpan humor and conceptual rigor: a capsized Laser sailboat turned vertical monument, a palm tree replacing its mast, and a title—S.O.S.—that refuses to resolve cleanly into sentiment. From Morse code to yacht club politics, from Spanglish boat names to disaster-relief coolers, Long builds a practice that blends maritime history, Miami mythologies, and a punk-inflected irreverence toward art's seriousness. Also featured in this episode – a CalArts performance art involving chocolate milk vomit, signal flags translating hip-hop lyrics, and why humor still makes the art world uncomfortable. Justin H. Long — https://justinhlong.comDuncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/Ryan Peter Miller — http://ryanpetermiller.com/Tom Sanford — https://www.tomsanford.art/Lumpen Radio — https://lumpenradio.comFlorida International University — https://www.fiu.eduCalArts (California Institute of the Arts) — https://calarts.eduBaker Hall Gallery — https://bakerhall.art/Spring/Break Art Show — https://www.springbreakartshow.com Design Miami — https://www.designmiami.comKey Biscayne Yacht Club — https://kbyc.orgContemporary Arts Center New Orleans — https://cacno.orgDamien Hirst — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst Nicole Eisenman — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Eisenman The Simpsons — https://www.thesimpsons.comKids in the Hall — https://www.kidsinthehall.ca  

I don't quite know how to start this. It feels important to repost this interview because of Hilde. Hilde Lynn Helpenstein was a kickass human. "Jerry Gogosian" was a lance aimed directly at our pretensions and self-importance. Through Jerry, Hilde developed an incisive understanding of how the art world works. She created a space where many of us felt seen, derided, embarrassed, challenged, or simply able to laugh at our own reflection. She used Jerry to investigate us, for better and worse. In doing so, she exposed the paradoxes, half-truths, and hypocrisies embedded in what we do and how we choose to spend our lives. I think we should have listened more carefully when she tried to take what she had learned and suggest other ways forward. Hilde fucking loved art. More than almost anything. I know that feeling. She knew something wasn't working and she was trying to understand it, diagnose it, and imagine alternatives. What changed for me in this interview was realizing that we were on the same trip. My friend Chris Johanson used to say, "Trip on it, don't fry on it." It's hard not to fry on the thing you love most, especially when you feel responsible for all of it. Hilde was generous and generative. Sadly, the art world can't love you back. It's a little like summer camp: a temporary bubble of perfection that can be difficult to bring back into everyday life. What Hilde wanted, I think, was for us to find a way to reconnect art to the world outside that bubble, and maybe get over ourselves in the process. I, and all of us at Bad at Sports, will miss our fellow traveler. d.

In this episode of Bad at Sports, recorded at the tail end of a sun-soaked, sweat-drenched, and somehow still magical Miami Art Week, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with curator and cultural programmer Esther Park—the force behind this year's public programming at New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). Park traces her origin story from working the front desk at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami to throwing illegal block parties in Wynwood, to shaping NADA's ambitious "Ecologies" program. The conversation spirals (as it should) into art world mythologies, Miami as mirage, the collapse and reinvention of criticism, and why the real work happens far below the visible surface. This is a conversation about infrastructure, community, exhaustion, joy, and why—despite everything—the ecosystem still matters. Esther Park — cultural programmer and curator (NADA Public Programming) Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Ryan Peter Miller — http://ryanpetermiller.com/ New Art Dealers Alliance — https://www.newartdealers.org/ Art Basel — https://www.artbasel.com/ Sam Keller — https://www.patrickparrish.com/artist/sam-keller Knight Foundation — https://knightfoundation.org/ Pérez Art Museum Miami — https://www.pamm.org/ Heather Hubbs — https://www.newartdealers.org/ Mel Chin — https://melchin.org/ Jerry Saltz — https://nymag.com/author/jerry-saltz/ Roberta Smith — https://www.nytimes.com/by/roberta-smith Peter Schjeldahl — https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-schjeldahl Christopher Knight — https://www.latimes.com/people/christopher-knight Hyperallergic — https://hyperallergic.com/ Ben Davis — https://www.benadavis.com/ Artnet — https://www.artnet.com/ Brad Troemel — https://bradtroemel.com/ Jerry Gogosian — https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/ Lori Waxman — https://60wrdmin.org/home.html KAWS — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaws Alec Monopoly — https://www.alecmonopoly.com/ Beeple — https://www.beeple-crap.com/  

Recorded live in the blazing Miami heat (seriously, surface-of-the-sun conditions), Duncan, Ryan, and crew sit down with Heather Hubbs, Executive Director of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), for a conversation about art fairs, artist ecosystems, and what it actually means to build a sustainable contemporary art community. From CBD waters and early-morning whiskey to global art economies and the future of ceramics, this episode captures Bad at Sports at its most "tailgate meets art world summit." Heather walks us through NADA's evolution from a member-driven trade association into a flexible, responsive platform that supports galleries, artists, and experimental projects across Miami, New York, and beyond. The conversation digs into post-pandemic market shifts, the logic behind fair restructuring (goodbye Sunday drag), and how Warsaw is unexpectedly a site of mass public hunger for art. Along the way: project spaces as incubators, ceramics as a rising force, and the enduring legacy of Chicago art world figures who shaped how fairs operate today. Also: inflatable dancing airmen. Chickens. Buttholes. You know, professionalism. New Art Dealers Alliance — https://www.newartdealers.org/ White Columns — https://www.whitecolumns.org/ Matthew Higgs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Higgs 47 Canal — https://47canal.us/ Bureau — https://bureau-inc.com/ Green Gallery — http://www.thegreengallery.biz/ Good Weather — https://www.instagram.com/goodweather.llc/?hl=en Blade Study — https://bladestudy.net/ Rhona Hoffman — https://www.rhoffmangallery.com/ Art Chicago — https://www.expochicago.com/ SOFA Chicago — https://www.sofaexpo.com/ John Riepenhoff — https://www.johnriepenhoff.net/ Celebrity Book Club — https://celebritybookclubpodcast.com/  

Chris Succo joins Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, and Tom Sanford in Miami for a conversation that slides easily from pronunciation jokes into a deep dive on abstraction, immediacy, and the quiet, often unspoken labor of sustaining an art practice. Succo unpacks a studio logic built on contradiction: paintings that feel fast but are deeply considered, surfaces that appear minimal but hold layers of decision-making, and a practice that balances commercial necessity with experimental risk. The conversation ranges across Succo's "white paintings," photographic references, sculptural work in foundries, and the strange economics of being a working painter. Along the way, the crew hits Miami art fair nostalgia, Miley Cyrus backed by The Flaming Lips, and the enduring romance of making something that might never sell. This one is about intuition, material intelligence, and what it actually means to keep going in the studio. Chris Succo - https://chrissucco.com/images/   Mark LeBlanc — https://mleblancchicago.com/ Richard Prince — https://gagosian.com/artists/richard-prince/ Paul McCarthy — https://hauserwirth.com/artists/paul-mccarthy/ Willem de Kooning — https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/willem-de-kooning Bushwick Bill — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushwick_Bill Miley Cyrus — https://www.mileycyrus.com/The Flaming Lips — https://www.flaminglips.com/MC Serch — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Serch Fugazi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugazi Michael Harding Paint — https://www.michaelharding.co.uk/ Gamblin — https://gamblincolors.com/  

Recorded in the sunburnt delirium of Miami, Duncan and crew stumble out of the Midwest and into the heat of the fairs, only to find a familiar sensibility in an unexpected place: Dreamsong. Rebecca Heidenberg joins the conversation to talk about building a gallery ecosystem in Minneapolis that resists isolation and instead fosters dialogue between regional artists and those working in larger art centers like New York and Los Angeles. From this conversation we get a portrait of a space that operates as both a commercial gallery and something closer to a cultural commons, anchored by programming, residency initiatives, and a commitment to community. From the founding logic of Dreamsong to the evolution of the Cloud House residency program, Rebecca outlines a model that prioritizes relationships over market pressure. The conversation moves fluidly between Minneapolis as a site of artistic possibility, the economics of running a gallery outside New York, and the strange spectacle of Miami's art fair ecosystem, including dystopian crypto exhibitions and phantom Lamborghini launches. Along the way: documentary filmmaking in Cuba, the legacy of an art-dealing mother, the emotional labor embedded in artistic practice, and the ongoing tension between "pretty" art and meaningful engagement in a complicated political moment. It's Midwest pragmatism meets art world absurdity. And somehow, it works. Rebecca Heidenberg — https://dreamsong.art/Dreamsong — https://dreamsong.art/Cloud House — https://thecloudhouse.org/Gregory Smith — https://dreamsong.art/Edgar Arceneaux — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Arceneaux Walker Art Center — https://walkerart.org/Minneapolis College of Art and Design — https://www.mcad.edu/Rachel Collier — https://rachelcollier.com/Hair + Nails — https://hairandnailsart.com/All My Relations Arts — https://allmyrelationsarts.org/ Minneapolis Institute of Art — https://new.artsmia.org/Henry Moore — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore Douglas Kearney — https://www.douglaskearney.com/ Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach Frieze Los Angeles — https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-los-angeles Jean-Michel Basquiat — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat  

Recorded live at NADA Art Fair, this episode finds the crew in full fair-mode: cramped booths, warm beverages, and the particular energy of artists, curators, and dealers trying to make something real happen in public. Joining the conversation is Amy Kligman, founder of Special Effects Gallery, a Kansas City–based gallery barely out of the gate and already showing at fairs. Alongside Tom Sanford, the conversation moves quickly from logistics and booth banter into something deeper: how artists carry histories, how objects hold people, and how a gallery can function less like a marketplace and more like a host. Kligman's project is both scrappy and intentional. Special Effects Gallery is rooted in Kansas City but outward-facing, acting as a connector, a translation device, and maybe even a love letter to regional practice that deserves a broader stage. The name itself comes from her parents' rural Indiana video store, a place that served as a portal to elsewhere - Special Effects Gallery carries that lineage and seeks out a similar ethos.    Amy Kligman — https://www.specialeffectsgallery.com/  https://www.amykligman.com/Tom Sanford — https://www.tomsanford.art/ Kevin Demery — https://www.kevindemery.com Rashawn Griffin — https://www.instagram.com/ras9s/Charlotte Street Foundation — https://charlottestreet.org/Plug Projects — https://plugprojects.org/Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art — https://nelson-atkins.org/NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://newartdealers.org/Dana Schutz — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Schutz

From the humid chaos of Miami Art Week, Bad at Sports drops into the garden at NADA for a conversation with two artists from Western Exhibitions: Nanako Kono and Olivia Zubkov. A loose, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful discussion about painting that isn't painting, sculpture that remembers your body, and bathrooms as sites of intimacy, memory, and quiet surveillance. Nanako walks through her hyper-flat, acrylic-based "paintings" that live somewhere between screen, object, and comic logic. Olivia counters with slip-cast porcelain sculptures drawn from domestic life. Towels, tiles, soap dishes, and mirrors become witnesses to the private rituals of living. The conversation drifts between material process, Chicago's influence, comic culture, color as personality, and the strange emotional charge of everyday objects. Along the way, there are riffs on boob lights, mold-making ethics, and whether your bathroom fixtures are silently judging you. Ryan Peter Miller — https://badatsports.comDuncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com Nanako Kono — https://www.nanakokono-rolly.com/ Olivia Zubkov — https://www.oliviazubko.com/ Scott Speh — https://westernexhibitions.com NADA Art Fair — https://newartdealers.orgLumpen Radio — https://lumpenradio.comSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.saic.eduUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas — https://www.unlv.eduRichard Rezac — https://www.richardrezac.com/ Julia Fish — https://juliafish.com/  

Recorded live at NADA Art Fair, Episode 942 features a deeply generous conversation with gallerist and artist Christopher Rivera—founder of Embajada ("Embassy") Gallery in Puerto Rico. Joined by hosts Ryan Peter Miller, Tom Sanford, and William "Bill" Pereda, Rivera discusses artist-led infrastructures, building a gallery as a political and conceptual project, and the evolving ecosystem of Puerto Rican contemporary art. At the center of the conversation is Rivera's presentation of artist Taina Cruz whose hybrid practice—spanning painting, robotics, and installation—anchors the booth. The discussion moves fluidly between artistic identity, diaspora, conceptual vs. formal practices, and the strange alchemy of building a gallery that resists becoming purely commercial. This is also a conversation about organic growth: careers, relationships, and opportunities that emerge through trust, community, and sustained engagement rather than strategy alone.   NADA Art Fair — https://www.newartdealers.org/ Taina Cruz https://tainacruz.com/ Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) — https://www.mica.edu/Yale University — https://www.yale.edu/Hunter College — https://hunter.cuny.edu/Marlborough Gallery — https://www.marlboroughgallery.com/ Rachel Uffner Gallery — https://www.racheluffnergallery.com/ Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling — https://www.sugarhillmuseum.org/ Artforum — https://www.artforum.com/Bad Bunny — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Bunny Joshua Nazario Lugo — https://joshuanazario.com/about Jan Anthony Olivares — https://www.instagram.com/janthonyolivares/ Carla Acevedo-Yates — https://mcachicago.org/about/who-we-are/people/carla-acevedo-yates William Wegman — https://www.wegmanworld.com/Claude Monet — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet Camille Pissarro — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro  

Recorded live in Atlanta at the Art Papers Symposium at Ponce City Market, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist, educator, and department chair Myra Greene for a conversation on materiality, identity, and the long arc from photography to textiles to weaving. The conversation centers on practice as evolution, about what happens when an artist refuses to stay in one lane, and about how material decisions carry conceptual weight. Greene reflects on her move from Columbia College Chicago to Spelman College, where she helped build a program grounded in storytelling, experimentation, and liberal arts integration. From ambrotypes to fabric dye to loom-based weaving, Greene's work consistently circles a central question: how can identity exist without the body?   Name Drops & Links Myra Greene — https://www.myragreene.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Spelman College — https://www.spelman.edu/ Columbia College Chicago — https://www.colum.edu/ Jeanne Gang — https://studiogang.com/ Mary Schmidt Campbell — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Schmidt_Campbell LaTanya Richardson Jackson — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTanya_Richardson Samuel L. Jackson — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_L._Jackson Candida Alvarez — https://candidaalvarez.com/ Patron Gallery — https://patrongallery.com/ The Weaving Mill — https://theweavingmill.com/ Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild — https://chgweavers.org/ Ansel Adams — https://www.anseladams.com/  

Recorded live during the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Emily Llamazales to talk speculative biology, adaptive futures, and sculptural ecosystems that feel equal parts laboratory experiment and sci-fi relic. Emily's work merges biochemistry, ecology, and material experimentation into immersive sculptural forms that hover between organism and artifact. From translucent photo-printed fabrics to ceramic "creatures" built from invasive species logic, her practice imagines a world where mutation is survival and adaptation is aesthetic strategy. The conversation ranges from collaborative exhibition-making and studio ecology to invasive snails, granite outcrops, and the porous boundary between science fiction and real science. Along the way: holography, grant writing, fungi, and the possibility that the future might already be quietly evolving around us.     Name Drops (with links) Emily Llamazales - https://www.emilyllamazales.com/  Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Jacob O'Kelly — (curator, Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta) https://www.artsatl.org/mint-names-new-executive-director-gallery-director-opens-four-shows/ Ben Steele — https://bensteeleart.com/ Aaron Putt — https://aaronkaganputt.com/ Burnaway — https://burnaway.org/ Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org/ Clio Art Fair / Clio (Savannah project space) — https://www.clioartfair.com/ Arts Capital Atlanta — https://www.artscapitalatlanta.org/ Arabia Mountain — https://arabiaalliance.org/ Ichetucknee Springs — https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/ichetucknee-springs-state-park Suwannee River — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwannee_River Apple Snail (invasive species) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_snail Dyssodia / "diamorpha" plants (granite outcrop flora) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyssodia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedum_smallii Scavengers Reign (TV series) — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21056886/ Futurama — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149460/ Adrian Tchaikovsky — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky  

Art Papers, Fire Ecology, and Ending Well This week on Bad at Sports, we sit down in Atlanta with Sarah Higgins, Executive and Artistic Director of Art Papers, during the Art Papers symposium. What unfolds is a candid, generous, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about what it means to end something well. As Art Papers approaches its final chapter after nearly 50 years, Higgins lays out a model for institutional closure that resists panic, rejects compromise, and instead asks: what if ending is a form of contribution? From the "fire ecology" framework to radical transparency about budgets, labor, and sustainability, this conversation moves from grief to strategy to something like collective possibility. Along the way: the death of art criticism models, nonprofit fatigue, Chicago parallels, and why maybe nobody is coming to save us. Names Dropped (Bad at Sports style) Sarah Higgins — https://www.artpapers.org Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Art Papers Symposium — https://www.artpapers.org New Art Examiner — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Art_Examiner Dan Talley — https://www.artpapers.org Laura Lieberman — https://www.artpapers.org Real Art Ways — https://realartways.org Critical Minded — https://criticalminded.org Ponce City Market — https://www.poncecitymarket.com Jamestown — https://www.jamestownlp.com National Endowment for the Arts — https://www.arts.gov Mary Louise Schumacher — https://www.marylouiseschumacher.com Lucy – https://www.thenewatlantis.com/futurisms/the-muddled-message-of-lucy Scarlett Johansson – https://scarlett-johansson.net/ Morgan Freeman – https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/f/fo-fz/morgan-freeman/

Recorded live at the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, this episode features a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation with Tori Tinsley. Joined by Brian Andrews and Duncan MacKenzie, Tinsley reflects on caregiving, grief, motherhood, and the evolution of her "hug" figures across painting, sculpture, and animation. Her practice emerges from lived experience, particularly her mother's diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia, and expands into a broader inquiry into emotional labor, embodiment, and the absurdity of contemporary life. Humor, instability, and tenderness coexist in work that resists resolution while remaining deeply accessible. Name Drop List (with links) Tori Tinsley — https://www.google.com/search?q=Tori+Tinsley+artist Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org/ School of the Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.saic.edu/ Georgia State University (GSU) — https://artdesign.gsu.edu/ William Kentridge — https://www.kentridge.studio/ Brené Brown — https://brenebrown.com/

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Abigail Satinsky sit down with Nato Thompson for a conversation that spans collapsing institutions, alternative economies, and what it actually means to sustain a life in art. Recorded in the context of an art fair ecosystem that increasingly blurs community, commerce, and survival, Thompson reflects on his path from Creative Time to Philadelphia Contemporary (RIP unrealized museum), and into his current multi-pronged practice: consulting, artist support, and the evolving Alternative Art School. What starts as a casual catch-up quickly becomes something sharper: a diagnosis of failing art school models, a critique of nonprofit dependency, and a proposal for artist-centered infrastructures that actually function. Along the way: dark matter artists, subscription economies, global classrooms, refrigerator exhibitions, and the radical idea that maybe art isn't a career ladder at all. Names Dropped (with links) Nato Thompson — https://natothompson.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Abigail Satinsky — https://www.abigailsatinsky.com/ Creative Time — https://creativetime.org/ Philadelphia Contemporary — https://philadelphiacontemporary.org/ Alternative Art School — https://alternativeartschool.net/ e-flux — https://www.e-flux.com/ Anton Vidokle — https://www.e-flux.com/about/anton-vidokle/ Powerhouse Arts — https://powerhousearts.org/ Raqs Media Collective — https://raqsmediacollective.net/ Tania Bruguera — https://www.taniabruguera.com/ Guadalupe Maravilla — https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com/ Jeremy Deller — https://www.jeremydeller.org/ Lexa Walsh — https://www.lexawalsh.com/ Times Square Arts — https://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts

Locks' exhibition operates as a split composition: the back gallery leans into layered, exploratory collage rooted in his teaching experience with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center, while the front gallery delivers sharper, declarative works built around text and figuration. The conversation frames this as a kind of A-side / B-side logic, with one space functioning like improvisational jazz and the other like a stripped-down, urgent punk track. Locks pushes back on easy analogies, but embraces the underlying idea: that both bodies of work are driven by different modes of attention and response. A major thread is process. Locks describes an almost anti-archival system of working, where stacks of Xeroxes, prints, and sampled sounds are mentally cataloged rather than digitally organized. This produces a practice grounded in rediscovery and accident, closer to crate-digging than database searching. Equally central is pedagogy. His decade-plus engagement with incarcerated students becomes a generative force, not a side project. The "homework" he assigns becomes his own studio method, expanding into the work shown here and into related musical output like List of Demands. Throughout, Locks positions his work within a lineage that moves fluidly between comic books, punk ephemera, Black radical print culture, and contemporary art. The result is a practice that refuses clean categorization, operating instead as an ongoing negotiation between sound, image, politics, and community. Names Dropped  Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Ryan (Peter Miller) — http://ryanpetermiller.com/ Damon Locks — https://damonlocks.black/ Goldfinch Gallery — https://goldfinch-gallery.com/ Lumpen Radio — https://lumpenradio.com/ Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — https://pnaep.org/ Stateville Correctional Center — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateville_Correctional_Center Artists / Art References Charles White — https://www.artic.edu/artists/23067/charles-white Raymond Pettibon — https://gagosian.com/artists/raymond-pettibon/ Emory Douglas — https://www.moma.org/artists/13246 Kerry James Marshall — https://kerryjamesmarshall.com/ Music / Punk References Bad Brains — https://www.badbrains.com/ Minor Threat — https://dischord.com/band/minor-threat Government Issue — https://dischord.com/band/government-issue The Clash — https://www.theclash.com/ Siouxsie and the Banshees — https://www.siouxsieandthebanshees.co.uk/ The Damned — https://www.officialdamned.com/ Big Black — https://touchandgorecords.com/bands/big-black/ Naked Raygun — https://www.nakedraygun.org/ Black Flag — https://sstsuperstore.com/collections/black-flag Comics / Illustration Influences John Byrne — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/b/byrne_john.htm Neal Adams — https://nealadams.com/ George Pérez — https://www.marvel.com/comics/creators/126/george_perez Marshall Rogers — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/r/rogers_marshall.htm

Guests: Annette LePique, Curtis Anthony Bozif, Pia Singh, Gareth Kaye Recorded with the support of Columbia College Chicago - Colum.edu What happens when you gather a room full of critics in a moment when criticism itself feels both endangered and newly alive? In this long-awaited return to the Chicago Critics Roundtable, Duncan sits down with a new multi-hyphenate crew of writers, curators, artists, and exhibition-makers to unpack the shifting role of criticism in a fractured "art ecology." What emerges is a conversation about care, attention, subjectivity, labor, and the strange intimacy of thinking deeply about someone else's work. From the death of legacy media to the rise of Substack, from writing as love to writing as agitation, this episode positions criticism as a lived, embodied, and often obsessive practice. Criticism is relational, literary, emotional, and deeply entangled with the conditions of making and showing art in Chicago today, and certainly never "neutral".  Name Drop List (with links) Duncan MacKenzie—https://kurasmackenzie.com/Brian Andrews—https://www.brianandrews.org/Annette LePique—https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/byline/annette-lepique/ Curtis Anthony Bozif—https://www.curtisanthonybozif.com/ Pia Singh—https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/22319-pia-singh Gareth Kaye—https://chicagospleen.substack.com/ Derrick Guthrie—https://derrickguthrie.com/ Lane Relyea—https://www.artic.edu/authors/71/lane-relyea James Elkins—https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/james-elkins Michelle Grabner—https://www.michellegrabner.com/ Lori Waxman—https://www.60inchcenter.org/lori-waxman Charles Baudelaire—https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-baudelaire Dave Hickey—https://www.artforum.com/contributors/dave-hickey Werner Herzog—https://www.bfi.org.uk/filmography/werner-herzog Timothy Morton—https://www.timothymorton.net/ Rachel Carson—https://www.rachelcarson.org/Peter Schjeldahl—https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-schjeldahl

Recorded at Gray Gallery This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Ryan Peter Miller, sit down with legendary British artist John Stezaker inside the unexpectedly elegant library at Gray Gallery. The conversation centers on Stezaker's recent exhibition RAFT and expands into a wide-ranging meditation on collage, photography, landscape, and the strange psychological terrain "between images." Stezaker reflects on his long-standing practice of working with found imagery, particularly Victorian-era topographical prints and film stills, and how his recent shift into landscape collage emerged during lockdown while living on the coast. What begins as a search for calm quickly mutates into something more unstable, even apocalyptic, mirroring broader cultural and political upheavals. The conversation touches on risk, intuition, the rejection of intentionality, and the generative power of getting lost in one's own archive. Stezaker's framing of collage as a way to examine the "abyss" between images becomes a central thread, offering a compelling rethinking of how we see, construct meaning, and navigate visual culture. There's also a candid and surprisingly funny detour into photography skepticism, pedagogy, and the emotional cycles of artistic production, including what Stezaker calls the "terrible moment" between bodies of work. Names Dropped John Stezaker — https://www.stezaker.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Ryan Peter Miller — https://www.ryanpetermiller.com/ Gray Gallery — https://graygallery.com/ Maurice Blanchot — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/blanchot/ Slade School of Fine Art — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/ Images Stezaker 2025, courtsey Gray Gallery.

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with Kate Sierzputowski to talk about the evolving identity of EXPO Chicago under Frieze and what 2026 signals for the fair, the city, and the Midwest at large. Now Director of EXPO, Sierzputowski reflects on scaling up leadership while doubling down on care for Chicago's ecosystem. The 2026 edition marks a shift toward a more curatorial, thematic, and relational fair model: smaller in scale, more intentional in layout, and driven by embedded curatorial frameworks rather than parallel programming. Major highlights include a deep institutional partnership with the Obama Presidential Center, a rethinking of the fair's floor plan and visitor flow, and a stronger emphasis on Midwest networks and inter-city cultural exchange. Across the conversation, Sierzputowski frames EXPO not just as a marketplace, but as a platform for storytelling, regional identity, and long-term relationship building. At stake is a bigger question: what does it mean for Chicago to be both global and defiantly local?     Kate Sierzputowski – EXPO Chicago Director – https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/kate-sierzputowski-director-expo-chicago-essence-harden-1234760346/ Duncan MacKenzie – https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews – https://www.brianandrews.org/ Frieze – https://www.frieze.com/ EXPO Chicago – https://www.expochicago.com/ Obama Presidential Center – https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/ Dr. Louise Bernard – Obama Presidential Center Founding Director – https://www.obama.org/press-releases/obama-foundation-announces-dr-louise-bernard-director-museum-obama-presidential-center/ Katie Pfohl - Detroit Institute of Art – https://www.diaart.org/ https://dia.org/about/media-room/news/detroit-institute-arts-names-katie-pfohl-associate-curator-contemporary-art Essence Harden –https://www.essenceharden.com/ Independent Curators International – https://curatorsintl.org/  Images by Leslie Hewett and courtesy of EXPO Chicago 

Recorded at the Art Papers Fire Ecology Symposium, Atlanta Atlanta artist Michi Meko joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews during Art Papers' symposium weekend for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from southern port cities and landscape painting to pandemic solitude, mental health, and the strange spiritual work of making art. Meko discusses his exhibition So Black and So Blue, a body of work developed between New Orleans and Savannah that reflects on color, history, and the charged atmosphere of southern coastal landscapes. Working with shimmering surfaces, deep blues, blacks, and gilded frames, the paintings operate between abstraction and landscape. They draw viewers into spaces that feel both cosmic and terrestrial, somewhere between daybreak and nightfall. The works are designed to be experienced in person, where layers of marks, reflective materials, and shifting color create movement and depth impossible to capture in photographs. The conversation expands into the tension between hard-edge abstraction and expressive mark-making. Meko describes his earlier work using nautical signal flags as coded language about survival and buoyancy in America, while also poking at the seriousness of modernist abstraction. From there, the group debates the emotional power of painting, touching on artists like Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly, asking what makes a work spiritually or emotionally resonant and why some paintings leave viewers cold. A major turning point in Meko's practice came during the COVID-19 shutdown. When Atlanta closed down, he packed his car with camping gear and disappeared into the mountains, spending long stretches alone hiking, fishing, and writing. The period became a personal reckoning. He stopped painting entirely, turned inward, and began confronting anxieties and habits that had previously gone unexamined. Through solitude and outdoor wandering, he reframed landscape not as scenery but as a metaphor for the inner terrain of the mind. When Meko eventually returned to the studio, that experience reshaped his work. The paintings that emerged began to reflect internal states rather than external views. Horizons divide mind and body. Shimmering skies become metaphors for thought and anxiety. Dense fields of mark-making hold viewers inside the work, drawing them in and out of the image in a restless visual rhythm. Throughout the conversation, Meko reflects on the strange transformation that can occur through isolation, describing the experience of leaving society and returning "a little feral, a little monk-like," carrying new perspectives about art, masculinity, therapy, and the ways people search for healing. What emerges is a portrait of an artist navigating between wilderness and studio, darkness and wonder, abstraction and landscape. For Meko, painting becomes both exploration and survival, a way of mapping the landscapes inside ourselves. Name Drop List (Bad at Sports style) Michi Meko - https://www.michimeko.com Art Papers - https://www.artpapers.org/ Duncan MacKenzie - https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews - https://www.brianandrews.org/ Louis Armstrong - https://www.louisarmstronghouse.org Mark Rothko - https://www.markrothko.org Rothko Chapel - https://www.rothkochapel.org Ellsworth Kelly - https://ellsworthkelly.org Bob Ross - https://www.bobross.com J. M. W. Turner - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jmw-turner-558 Thomas Cole - https://thomascole.org The Goat Farm Arts Center - https://goatfarmartscenter.com New Orleans Savannah Gulf of Mexico

Recorded during Miami art week at NADA, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with artists Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias to talk about painting, fiber, migration, labor, and the strange textures of building an art practice across borders. Vargas Bravo and Lemonias both arrived at NADA through Andrew Rafacz Gallery, but their paths into the fair and into the United States are very different. Vargas Bravo, a painter originally from Mexico City and currently completing graduate studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, discusses work that reimagines familiar structures of division. Her paintings pull from the visual language of Western painting while subverting its traditions, including a monumental image of a collapsed chain-link fence that imagines the fall of structures meant to separate and contain. The conversation moves through borders as both literal and symbolic constructs, and how living in Chicago has reshaped the stakes of the work. Lemonias, a Jamaican-born artist working in fiber and print processes, describes a practice rooted in care labor, migration, and material culture. Drawing from her experiences as a nanny in the United States, Lemonias incorporates children's clothing, food packaging, and other domestic remnants into textile works that trace the economies of caregiving and consumption. The materials themselves carry the stories of the households they passed through, mapping the intersection of labor, class, and migration that often remains invisible in the art world. Along the way the discussion opens into a larger conversation about mentorship, access, and the informal knowledge that structures the art ecosystem. Lemonias reflects on learning the unwritten rules of American cultural institutions while navigating race, class, and belonging, while Vargas Bravo speaks about the complicated promise of the "American dream" from the perspective of an international artist whose time in Chicago has included both opportunity and trauma. Both artists also unpack the evolving relationships between artists and galleries, describing representation less as a hierarchy than as a collaborative process built on trust and dialogue. Recorded amid the hum of the fair floor at New Art Dealers Alliance during Miami art week, the conversation moves easily from the practical realities of art fairs to the deeper social forces shaping contemporary practice. The result is a candid and thoughtful exchange about what it means to make work in a world structured by borders, labor, and the fragile networks that allow artists to keep going. Name Drop List Berenice Vargas Bravo — https://berenicevargasbravo.com Krystal Lemonias — https://www.krystallemonias.com Andrew Rafacz Gallery — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Andrew Rafacz — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Janelle Dawson — https://www.janelledawson.com School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) — https://www.saic.edu NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://www.newartdealers.org EXPO Chicago — https://www.expochicago.com Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com Bazaar Magazine (France) — https://www.bazaar.fr

Recorded in Atlanta during the Art Papers symposium: Fire Ecology Artist Antonio Darden joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews in Atlanta, where the conversation opens with one of the most arresting images in Darden's recent work: an alien laid out on an autopsy table. What begins as a discussion of a strange installation quickly unfolds into a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory, and the ways artists translate trauma into form. Darden describes the work Last One Left, a project that emerged from a cascade of personal losses: the deaths of his mother, brother, and father, leaving him the final surviving member of his immediate family. The alien body becomes a surrogate figure, a way to approach unbearable realities obliquely. Humor, conspiracy culture, and pop imagery become tools for making painful subjects accessible without dulling their impact. As Darden explains, confronting audiences with a literal body can shut down reflection, but a grey alien opens a space where grief can be processed at a distance before it lands. The conversation moves through the complicated emotional landscape that shaped these works: family histories stretching from Trinidad to New York, the lingering trauma of police violence after his brother's death in Atlanta, and the strange burden of becoming the keeper of a family archive of memories, objects, and stories. Darden reflects on what it means to inherit not only possessions but also responsibility for the narrative of a family's past. From there, the discussion shifts to Darden's increasingly theatrical performance practice. He recounts a recent performance staged in an entirely blacked-out theater that blended wrestling mythology, Atlanta rap history, gospel music, cinematic references, and sculptural staging into a chaotic and emotional ritual. Undertaker imagery, Pastor Troy, Lil' Kim, and The Naked Gun collide in a deliberately excessive spectacle meant to mirror the overwhelming density of memory and grief. Throughout the conversation, Darden describes his work as a kind of mental montage. Cars, hip-hop, conspiracy theories, television shows, and family trauma coexist in the same symbolic landscape. Rather than separating high and low culture, he embraces the full range of references that shape lived experience. The episode also turns toward the future, as Darden reflects on fatherhood and the challenge of raising a young son while carrying the weight of family history. In contrast to the losses that haunt his work, his son's creativity and confidence offer a different kind of legacy. What emerges is a portrait of an artist using humor, spectacle, and cultural collage to navigate the most difficult questions of survival, responsibility, and memory. Name Drop List: Antonio Darden – https://www.antoniogdarden.com Craig Drennen – https://craigdrennen.com Jared Christian – https://www.instagram.com/jaredchristian Devonté Hynes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dev_Hynes Blood Orange – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Orange_(musician) Young Thug – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Thug Shawty Lo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawty_Lo Pastor Troy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastor_Troy Lil' Kim – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil%27_Kim John P. Kee – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Kee Gillian Anderson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Anderson Dana Scully – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Scully The X-Files – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files Tupac Shakur – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur Michael Jackson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order:_Special_Victims_Unit Olivia Benson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Benson Gordon Ramsay – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Nightmares Kanye West – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West Bound 2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_2 The Ponderosa Twins Plus One – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ponderosa_Twins_Plus_One The Undertaker – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undertaker Priscilla Presley – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Presley Leslie Nielsen – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Nielsen The Naked Gun – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Gun Cyclops – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclops_(Marvel_Comics) X-Men '97 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_%2797 Radcliffe Bailey – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_Bailey Art Papers – https://www.artpapers.org/ Fire Ecology – https://www.artpapers.org/fire-ecology/  

Recorded on the fly during art fair week, live at NADA, this conversation with Dan Attoe moves from metal-kid origin stories to Zen meditation, daily practice, tattooing, landscape painting, and the unexpected turn toward writing a horror novel. Duncan opens with a personal note: a Dan Attoe painting has been hanging in his home for 22 years, a wedding gift that quietly embedded itself into the fabric of his life, which frames the conversation, and traces Attoe's arc from rural Idaho and northern Minnesota outsider to one of the most recognizable painters of his generation. Attoe talks about the seven-year run of making a painting every weekday, a discipline that functioned less as a productivity hack and more as a survival strategy. What began as wild, sex-and-drugs-and-rowdy-party imagery rooted in imagined social worlds gradually shifted toward the meditative landscapes he's now known for. These aren't observed sites but constructed psychic spaces, built from memory, attention, and what he calls a process of "composting" experience. Zen practice, daily drawing, and tattooing form a three-part studio structure that keeps the work in motion. Learning to tattoo on his own body sharpened his attention to contrast, permanence, and empathy, feeding directly back into the paintings. Along the way we get patches, skate culture, Methodist guilt, Barry McGee installations, Walker Art Center bookstore theory dives, and the long road from being told to abandon heavy-metal imagery to fully embracing it as the engine of a mature practice. The conversation closes on writing: how Stephen King, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and decades of accumulated art-world experience led Attoe to channel theory, narrative, and lived history into a horror novel. It's a talk about attention, energy, and letting the work tell you what it needs to become. Images courtesy of Western Exhibitions -  A party for children, 2019 India ink and graphite on paper 7h x 7w in   Fingertip Mountain, 2020 Oil on Canvas on Panel 24h x 24w in   Forest Path with Glowing Orb, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in   Dual Falls with Painted Arches, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in Names Dropped: Dan Attoe — https://www.danattoe.com Dan Attoe at Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com/artists/dan-attoe Dan Attoe at PPOW — https://ppowgallery.com/artists/dan-attoe/ Clouds Tattoo (Attoe's shop) — https://www.cloudstattoo.com A Talking Tree — https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Tree-Dan-Attoe/dp/B0D4JGYR2F Barry McGee — https://www.ratio3.org/artists/barry-mcgee Chris Johanson — https://altman-siegel.com/artists/chris-johanson Jean-Michel Basquiat — https://gagosian.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ Titian — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/titian Giorgione — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/giorgione Arthur Danto — https://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/faculty/danto.html Dr. Woo — https://drwoo.com Natalie Goldberg — https://nataliegoldberg.com Stephen King — https://stephenking.com George Saunders — https://georgesaundersbooks.com Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — https://www.harpercollins.com/products/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-robert-m-pirsig Jean-François Lyotard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/ Jean Baudrillard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ Walker Art Center — https://walkerart.org Iowa Writers' Workshop — https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu Iron Maiden — https://www.ironmaiden.com Danzig — https://www.danzig-verotik.com Twin Peaks — https://www.sho.com/twin-peaks Dragonlance / Larry Elmore — https://larryelmore.com New Art Dealers Alliance –– https://www.newartdealers.org/

Recorded live at the Stony Island Arts Bank with the Chicago Architecture Biennial Robert Burnier joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between sculpture, drawing, divination systems, urban planning, Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and the politics of place. Known for his bent and torsioned aluminum works—objects that hold gesture, decision, and duration in their skins—Burnier talks about a recent body of drawings made while traveling between Europe and South Africa. Working on translucent washi paper, the pieces attempt to register light, color, and spatial memory rather than image, emerging from time spent in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap and the erased landscape of District Six. The discussion connects these experiences to Burnier's upbringing in Oak Park and to larger questions about how communities are structured, protected, or destroyed through seemingly mundane formal decisions. From there the conversation spirals outward into the role of myth, tarot, and Yoruba divination as models for thinking through chaos, and into the slow time of art as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary media. Lorezetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government becomes a touchstone for considering how abstraction can carry ethical or civic attitude without becoming propaganda, and how form itself can function as content. Throughout, Burnier frames sculpture and drawing as "sites of possibility" rather than statements—tuning forks for thought that ask viewers to complete the work through their own duration and attention. The episode closes with talk of new material directions following a recent Pollock-Krasner grant and an ongoing commitment to work that never fully resolves, but keeps adjusting—open, provisional, and in motion. Images courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery. Zulua Ĉ iela Kapo, 2025 (top) Acrylic on aluminum Nebulaj Ćeloj (Soyinka IV), 2023 (bottom) Acrylic on aluminum   Robert Burnier – https://www.robertburnier.com Andrew Rafacz Gallery – https://andrewrafacz.com Corvi-Mora (London) – https://www.corvi-mora.com Bad at Sports – https://badatsports.com Lumpen Radio (WLPN 105.5 FM) – https://lumpenradio.com Agnes Martin – https://www.moma.org/artists/3787 Ambrogio Lorenzetti – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lorenzet/ambrogio/governme/index.html Bo-Kaap (Cape Town) – https://www.capetown.travel/areas/bo-kaap/ Buddhism – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism Chicago Architecture Biennial – https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org Christopher Wool – https://gagosian.com/artists/christopher-wool/ District Six Museum – https://www.districtsix.co.za Oak Park, Illinois – https://www.oak-park.us Piet Mondrian – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/piet-mondrian-1654 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) – https://www.saic.edu Schopenhauer – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/ Stony Island Arts Bank – https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank Takashi Murakami – https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Takashi_Murakami/1 Tarot – https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot Yoruba Divination (Ifá) – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ifa

Recorded in Miami during art fair week: Alfred Steiner joins Bad at Sports live from Miami, arriving by bicycle from the beach in full cowboy boots and jeans, already soaked through and fully inside the psychic weather of art fair week. A painter, conceptual artist, and practicing intellectual property lawyer, Steiner brings a rare combination of market fluency, legal clarity, and genuine artistic skepticism to a conversation that moves easily between booths, blockchain, copyright law, and the unwritten rules that quietly govern the art world. The discussion opens with a pulse check on the fairs, moving from NADA's familiar "house style" of faux-naïve figurative painting to the broader diversity of the main fair. Rather than ranking winners and losers, Steiner frames art fairs as emotionally destabilizing machines, places where impressive work and baffling work coexist in ways that are equally exhausting. What matters most is not judgment but endurance, the daily labor of continuing to make work in a system that constantly measures value against visibility and sales. From there, the episode dives deep into Steiner's dual practice. As an artist, his work spans painting, language-based conceptual pieces, NFTs, and legal interventions that deliberately stress-test institutional systems. He walks through two blockchain projects that were designed to fail commercially, including one where each NFT generates a unique text based on a buyer's Ethereum address, and another where ownership includes the right to alter the work itself, opening the door to misuse, mischief, and unexpected generosity. NFTs check in as, Steiner recounts a moment when an NFT holder copied a high-value work by Mitchell Chan, prompting Chan to respond by turning the forgery into an original drawing. The story becomes a parable about trust, legitimacy, and the strange ethics that emerge when technology destabilizes traditional ideas of originality. The conversation touches copyright law, photography, and artificial intelligence. Steiner explains why registering a copyright still matters, even in an age of ubiquitous images, and why most photographs are protected by default despite containing little expressive decision-making. He outlines how current legal frameworks are struggling to catch up with AI training practices, predicting that future court decisions will hinge not on whether content was scraped, but on how models are used and whose markets they undermine. Threaded throughout is a candid reflection on professional identity. Steiner speaks openly about the suspicion artists face when they have parallel careers, the romantic myth of total artistic devotion, and the quiet prejudice against artists who appear too competent, too organized, or too financially stable. Having spent years working part-time at Morrison & Foerster before founding his own firm, Steiner argues that the art world's fear of "dabblers" says more about its investment logic than about artistic seriousness. Recorded live, mid-fair, with sweat, exhaustion, legal theory, and humor all equally present, the episode offers a rare look at how art, law, labor, and belief intersect... Just don't look to hard at it.   NAMES DROPPED Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com Ethereum blockchain — https://ethereum.org Mitchell Chan — https://mitchellchan.com Rick Astley (via Rickrolling NFTs) — https://www.rickastley.co.uk Lawrence Weiner — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lawrence-weiner-2124 U.S. Copyright Office — https://www.copyright.gov Supreme Court of the United States — https://www.supremecourt.gov Morrison & Foerster Alfred Steiner - https://alfredsteiner.com/

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial Gabriel Barcia-Colombo joins Bad at Sports from a rain-soaked tailgate outside the Stony Island Arts Bank, in the middle of Chicago Architecture Biennial programming and an open-hours weekend that turns the city into both subject and stage. A media artist whose work consistently centers human presence inside technological systems, Barcia-Colombo is in Chicago to present Media Stream, a large-scale public artwork that brings the people of Chicago directly onto the architecture they move through every day. The project is built from hundreds of filmed participants, composited into an algorithmic, ever-changing flow across vertical LED blades embedded in a public building. Contributors are asked to perform ordinary gestures, then to imagine moments of sublimity or loss, producing intimate, vulnerable expressions that are scaled up and encountered by strangers passing through the space. The result is a work that reverses the usual logic of media spectacle, shifting attention away from screens and systems and back toward the faces of people themselves. From there, the conversation opens into a wide-ranging discussion of digital memory, data after death, and the uneasy permanence of media archives. Barcia-Colombo reflects on early works like Animalia, Chordata, his long-running interest in collecting and containing human presence, and later projects such as The Hereafter Institute, which staged personalized funerals for participants' digital lives. Throughout, the group wrestles with the problem of preservation in media art, from CRT monitors and film projectors to contemporary AI tools that threaten to erase labor, context, and material specificity. The episode also touches on Barcia-Colombo's collaboration with David Byrne, his role as co-director of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the contradictions of teaching technology as a humanist practice inside systems driven by speed, spectacle, and capitalization. What emerges is a thoughtful meditation on how artists can still create moments of connection and care inside infrastructures not designed for either. Recorded live, mid-storm, with rain hitting the merch cart and conversation drifting easily between theory, jokes, and deeply personal reflection. Highlights & Moments Turning public architecture into a living portrait of the city LED "blades" as broken, moving images rather than seamless spectacle Directing strangers to perform the everyday and the sublime Data, memory, and what happens to our digital lives after death Early video art as prophecy rather than nostalgia The problem of preserving media art as technologies disappear Labor, erasure, and value in digital and AI-assisted work Teaching technology as a humanist practice at NYU ITP Collaborating with David Byrne under extreme time constraints AI as mirror, therapist, and deeply unsettling collaborator Names Dropped Stony Island Arts Bank — https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/ Chicago Architecture Biennial — https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org Media Stream - https://150mediastream.com/ Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - https://www.gabebc.com/ Times Square public art installations Animalia, Chordata The Hereafter Institute Nam June Paik — https://www.paikstudios.com Bruce Nauman — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1478 Paul Pfeiffer — https://www.moma.org/artists/4595 Christian Marclay — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay-732 NYU Tisch School of the Arts — https://tisch.nyu.edu Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — https://itp.nyu.edu Neon Museum, Las Vegas — https://www.neonmuseum.org

Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) Recorded in Miami during art fair week Nicholas DiLeonardi joins Bad at Sports from the middle of Miami art fair week, not from a booth but from the pavement between them. Assistant Director and consultant at Gitler&_____, DiLeonardi spends the week moving between fairs, collectors, hammocks, robot dogs, and banana sightings, offering a ground-level view of what art fairs actually feel like when you are advising clients rather than selling from behind a wall. The conversation moves fluidly from ranking fairs to questioning the psychic cost of sitting in a booth, from the pleasures of approachable painting to skepticism about over-packaged meaning. DiLeonardi talks candidly about advising as a practice, collecting as a responsibility, and why sometimes the best work is the work that does not want to explain itself. Along the way, the group unpacks the strange theater of Art Basel, the social logic of NADA, the pleasures and limits of Untitled, and what it means to keep showing up to a system that is both exhausting and irresistible. The episode also dives into Gitler&____'s public-facing projects, including the long-running Audubon Mural Project, and the blurred line between consultancy, gallery work, and artist support. It is a conversation about taste, access, labor, exhaustion, and the odd hope that keeps people flying back to Miami year after year. Recorded live, with roosters, bridges, hammocks, and just enough art world self-awareness to stay funny. Highlights & Moments Ranking Miami fairs while openly admitting bias Why NADA still feels like a New York fair dropped into Miami Hammocks as both seating and market distortion Untitled as the gateway fair for first-time collectors The Beeple robot dog spectacle and the freedom of not knowing how to feel about it Counting banana references across satellite fairs "No motive" painting and the desire for unmediated experience Art advising as a creative practice rather than pure transaction The psychic toll of booth sitting and forced enthusiasm Why pre-selling booths feels like theater everyone agrees to perform   Names Dropped: ·       Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach ·       NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami ·       Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com/ ·       Scope Art Show — https://scope-artshow.com/  ·       Audubon Mural Project — https://www.audubon.org/muralproject ·       National Audubon Society — https://www.audubon.org/ ·       Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) coverage — https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/beeple-pooping-robot-dogs-at-art-basel-miami-beach-1234765375/ ·       Robert Moskowitz- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moskowitz ·       Andrew Spence- https://andrewspenceart.com ·       Western Exhibitions- https://westernexhibitions.com ·       Submissions- https://www.submissions.art ·       Canada Gallery- https://canadagallery.com ·       Mac's Club- https://www.macsclubdeuce.com ·       Gitler&____- https://www.gitlerand.com/

In Part 2 of the Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (Jerry Gogosian) conversation, the discussion turns raw, vulnerable, and deeply structural. Hilde speaks candidly about burnout, public vilification, online pile-ons, and the emotional cost of living as a persona inside an unforgiving attention economy. She describes losing followers overnight, being labeled with extreme political accusations, and watching the art world take visible pleasure in her public failures while remaining silent during her successes. She recounts the personal toll of constant media exposure, professional pressure, and economic precarity: marriage collapse, total exhaustion, and a year-long withdrawal from work following multiple suicide attempts. Jerry, she explains, has evolved from a meme engine into a living, walking performance — where even the most banal moments of daily life become content whether she wants them to or not. The episode confronts what it means to live as a meme in a broken matrix of attention, validation, and misrecognition. The conversation pivots into economics and geography. Drawing on her business school training, Hilde walks through quantitative tightening, interest rates, the collapse of NFTs and crypto, and the bursting of the 2022 speculative bubble. She frames art explicitly as a Veblen good — a luxury asset that fails first when the economy tightens. She argues forcefully that New York is no longer an artist city, but a financialized transaction hub. Instead, she advocates for artists to relocate to affordable cities like Chicago or even small towns, building localized collector bases rather than chasing validation from elite centers. What emerges is a sharp, pragmatic model of survival: cultivate 12 lifelong collectors, embrace regional ecosystems, make work for people you actually live with, and stop imagining museum permanence as the only measure of success. Hilde rejects the mythology of infinite institutional validation, arguing instead for circulation, use, disposal, and lived attachment. The episode closes on the tension between speculation and sustainability, between global markets and local communities, and between career branding and genuine artistic life. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/ New Art Dealers Alliancehttps://www.newartdealers.org/ John Waters https://www.johnwaters.com/ Peaches (musician/performer) https://peachesmusic.net/ Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) https://www.beeple-crap.com/ Maurizio Cattelan https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/maurizio-cattelan Brice Marden https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/brice-marden-1577 Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/ Pace Gallery https://www.pacegallery.com/ Roxy Theatre, San Francisco (The Roxie) https://roxie.com/ Soho House https://www.sohohouse.com/ Ice Palace Studios, Miami (Art Fair Venue) https://www.icepalacestudios.com/ New York MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) https://new.mta.info/ Federal Reserve (The Fed) https://www.federalreserve.gov/ Whitney Museum of American Art https://whitney.org/ Chicago, IL https://www.choosechicago.com/ New York City, NY https://www.nyc.gov/ Dahlonega, Georgia https://www.dahlonega.org/ Miami Beach, FL https://www.miamibeachfl.gov/ Basel, Switzerland https://www.basel.com/en  

At NADA Miami 2025, Bad at Sports' Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known to most of the art world as meme-lord and art-world agent provocateur Jerry Gogosian. In a conversation that swings between dead serious and totally unhinged, Hilde traces the unlikely origin story of Jerry: a near-fatal tick bite in Hudson, NY; weeks in the ICU where she went blind, deaf, and lost the use of her hands and feet; and the eight-month bedridden period that led her to start making art-world memes "six or seven a day" just to stay sane.  She explains how Jerry Gagosian—a name cheekily mashed up from Jerry Saltz and Larry Gagosian—became an anonymous voice for the insiders, registrars, assistants, and "world's oldest interns" of the art world. Positioned "at the cutting edge of stating the obvious," Jerry's memes mined the absurdities of art fairs, galleries, power, and self-seriousness, often circulating so widely that even Arne Glimcher at Pace blasted one to the entire staff. For Hilde, the memes were "fast food," while the deeper writing and podcasting they spawned became the real work. The episode also dives into Hilde's hatred of artspeak, her love of Pixar movies as real art, and the gulf between what artists claim their work does in press releases and what's actually visible in the work. She riffs on turning incomprehensible exhibition texts into literal film scripts, skewers academic pretense, and praises the raw "holy" feeling of walking into a gallery without any language or theory at all.  In the second half of the conversation, Hilde talks about going to business school at NYU Stern after years inside galleries and the market. Learning macro- and microeconomics, statistics, and reading things like Enron's 10-K filings gave her a new lens on the art world as a distorted, unsustainable luxury market in a broader service-and-finance-based U.S. economy. From there, she and the hosts push into the hard questions: oversupply and under-demand for art, MFA pipelines, self-censorship, the moral theater of "perfect" artists, and why she believes most art schools should probably be consolidated or shut down. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/ Jerry Saltz https://www.vulture.com/author/jerry-saltz/ Larry Gagosian https://gagosian.com/ Arne Glimcher https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/arne-glimcher/ Ben Davis https://news.artnet.com/author/ben-davis Kenny Schachter https://www.artnet.com/artists/kenny-schachter/ Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/ Barbara Kingsley https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-kingsley-5b6b2411/ Delvin Duarte https://www.instagram.com/delvinduarte/ Keith Boadwee https://www.keithboadwee.com/ NADA Miami https://www.newartdealersalliance.org/ Art Basel Miami Beach https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach Pace Gallery https://www.pacegallery.com/ Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) https://www.moca.org/ NYU Stern School of Business https://www.stern.nyu.edu/ San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) https://sfai.edu/ SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) https://www.sec.gov/ Enron (corporate reference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron Vancouver Art Gallery https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/ Pixar https://www.pixar.com/ Up (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/ Inside Out (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/ Soul (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2948372/ The Diving Bell and the Butterfly https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/ John Wick https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2911666/

Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank / Chicago Architecture Biennial tailgate In this wild, funny, and unexpectedly heartfelt tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, Ryan Peter Miller, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with sculptor and arts worker Andi Crist in front of the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The conversation moves fluidly between jokes about heated bamboo floors, fake Uber snacks, soggy bottoms, and bees swarming the microphones — but at its core, the episode is an unusually generous portrait of an artist who's spent years inside the hidden labor structures of museums, galleries, and fabrication shops. Crist discusses her debut solo museum exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Live Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths. She traces her evolution from preparator and art worker to exhibiting artist, unpacking how years of installing, patching walls, and fabricating for others shaped her own deeply self-aware sculptural practice. Her work twists familiar objects — especially extension cords, wet floor signs, and museum benches — into uncanny, absurd, and often poignant ceramic sculptures. A major highlight is Crist performing, in full BBC British-schoolmarm mode, the ChatGPT-generated Jane-Austen-style text she inscribed onto a handcrafted wet floor sign. The hosts derail repeatedly into laughter but also probe serious questions about labor visibility, materials, usefulness, and what it means to "gussy up" the hidden structures of the art world and present them as art. Throughout the episode, Crist reflects on her Southern-to-Chicago shift, her years of preparator culture, the pleasures and irritations of coiling cords, the aesthetics of infrastructure, and her dream of sneaking her replica Art Institute bench into the museum permanently. Her practice sits at the intersection of devotion, mischief, and craft — a perfect "match" for Bad at Sports tailgate chaos. Andi Crist https://andicrist.com/ EJ Hill https://ejhillart.com/ Jamila James (curator; formerly ICA LA, currently at Carnegie Museum of Art) https://cmoa.org/people/jamila-james/ Justin Witte (Director/Curator, Cleve Carney Museum of Art) https://cod.edu/academics/arts_communications/departments/art/faculty/witte.aspx Cleve Carney Museum of Art https://theccma.org/ Stony Island Arts Bank https://rebuild-foundation.org/arts-bank/ Chicago Architecture Biennial https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/ The Art Institute of Chicago https://www.artic.edu/ UIC School of Art & Art History https://artandarthistory.uic.edu/ Columbia College Chicago — School of Visual Arts https://www.colum.edu/academics/school-of-visual-arts/ Mary Berry (Great British Bake Off) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Berry Prue Leith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prue_Leith Great British Bake Off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_British_Bake_Off Hobby Lobby https://www.hobbylobby.com/ Michaels https://www.michaels.com/ Play-Doh Fun Factory https://shop.hasbro.com/en-us/product/play-doh-fun-factory/ (representative product link) Far Side (Gary Larson) https://www.thefarside.com/ Let Me Google That For You (LMGTFY) https://letmegooglethat.com/

Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago / CAB Tailgate In this live MCA tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, Brian Andrews, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with Chicago Tribune and Hyperallergic critic Lori Waxman to dig into the past, present, and uncertain future of art criticism.   Lori Waxman speaks candidly about being one of the last remaining "paper critics" in the Midwest, the strange privilege and responsibility of writing for a general audience, and the realities of practicing criticism in a media ecosystem that has largely abandoned it. The conversation moves between the lightly chaotic and the deeply reflective: the team discusses accountability, gatekeeping, democratization, descriptive vs. evaluative criticism, and the uneasy role of critics in shaping a city's cultural memory. A major portion of the episode is devoted to Waxman's long-running performance project "The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic," which she describes as part-service, part-performance, part-publishing experiment — one that temporarily gives a community something most cities no longer have: a local critic writing about local work. From describing her process of writing in public (fully clothed), to fielding questions about dead artists, visibility, taste, and how critics navigate their own spreadsheets, Waxman opens up her practice with humor and clarity. The episode also includes reflections on Chicago's art ecology, journalism's collapse, how artists use reviews, and what it means to keep going when the platforms keep disappearing. Names Dropped — With Links Lori Waxman

Recorded live at the CAB6 × MCA Tailgate This episode was recorded as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB6) activation on the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where Bad at Sports staged a series of open-air interviews, community dialogues, and tailgate-style broadcasts. Artists, architects, students, and the public intersected in a shared social space designed for porous conversation. Episode 920 features Tony Lewis, whose practice has shaped Chicago's contemporary drawing discourse for more than a decade. In this conversation, Tony Lewis joins Bad at Sports for an unscripted outdoor interview on the MCA plaza during the Architecture Biennial. The discussion moves fluidly between Lewis's formative years in Chicago, the evolution of his drawing practice, his relationship to language systems (notably shorthand), and the material intelligence behind works that incorporate rubber bands, graphite, or constraint mechanisms. Lewis reflects on mentorship, studio discipline, the importance of failure and patience, and the way drawing becomes a long-term conversation with materials. He speaks candidly about the Chicago art ecosystem, the emotional dimensions of his practice, and the shifting sense of scale and intimacy in his recent work — including his Louis Bag series and large graphite constructions. The episode captures an artist thinking in real time about endurance, attention, vulnerability, and artistic friendship. ·       Drawing as a full-body practice: constraint, tension, rubber bands, architecture of line. ·       Language + shorthand: transcription, coded systems, linguistic compression. ·       Chicago as a site of artistic maturation: community, humility, seriousness. ·       Material intelligence: graphite as dust, weight, pressure, residue. ·       Patience and endurance: long timelines for developing works. ·       Professional evolution: moving from iconic early works to quieter, more intimate forms. ·       Artistic friendship and trust: collaboration, studio visits, long-running dialogues. ·       Shorthand Drawings / Gregg Shorthand–based works ·       Rubber band constructions & torn-grid drawings ·       Graphite floor drawings / powder dispersion works ·       Louis Bag series  ·       Wall-based large graphite sheets under tension NAMES DROP-ed  ·       Tony Lewis - https://massimodecarlo.com/artists/tony-lewis ·       Kevin Beasley (referenced indirectly in relation to material practice) - https://caseykaplangallery.com/artists/beasley/ ·       Nate Young - https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/36-nate-young/works/ ·       Theaster Gates - https://www.theastergates.com/ ·       Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/ ·       Kerry James Marshall - https://jackshainman.com/artists/kerry_james_marshall ·       William Pope.L - https://www.miandn.com/artists/pope-l ·       Rodney McMillian - https://vielmetter.com/artists/rodney-mcmillian/ ·       Amanda Williams - https://awstudioart.com/home.html ·       Rashid Johnson - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2830-rashid-johnson/ ·       Charles Gaines - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/21845-charles-gaines/ ·       Torkwase Dyson - https://www.torkwasedyson.com/ ·       Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) - https://mcachicago.org/ ·       Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/ ·       Shane Campbell Gallery - https://www.shanecampbellgallery.com/ ·       School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) - https://www.saic.edu/   Image Sarah Hudson

This week, Bad at Sports hits the road and heads north to Sheboygan and Kohler, Wisconsin — where art, industry, and community collide. We drop into the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency program to see how a small Midwestern town sustains one of the most ambitious intersections of art and manufacturing in the country. Michelle Grabner and Jodi Throckmorton. From toilets to terracotta, brass casting to bathroom design, Kohler has been quietly incubating radical artistic practice for decades, embedding artists in its factories while JMKAC builds a civic platform for art environments, vernacular traditions, and contemporary experimentation. We talk with artists, administrators, and community members about what makes this ecosystem work — and why Sheboygan might just be the weirdest, most wonderful art town in America. John Michael Kohler Arts Center @jmkacKohler Arts/Industry Residency Kohler Co. @kohler   Name-Drop Jodi Throckmorton  - https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/7932-jodi-throckmorton Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/ John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) — https://www.jmkac.org/ Kohler Arts/Industry Residency — https://www.jmkac.org/arts-industry/ Kohler Co. — https://www.kohlercompany.com/ Art Preserve (JMKAC's satellite museum) — https://www.jmkac.org/art-preserve/ Arts/Industry Alumni (sampled in conversation): Beth Lipman — https://www.bethlipman.com/ | @beth_lipman Ann Agee — https://www.annageestudio.com/ Jeffrey Clancy — https://jeffreyclancy.com/home.html Ashwini Bhat — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/ashwini-bhat-reverberating-self/ Pao Houa — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/pao-houa-her-the-imaginative-landscape/ Lily Cox-Richard  — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/water-sprouts-and-remains-an-unfolding/ Sheboygan community — https://www.townofsheboyganwi.gov/  

This week we sit down with Amanda Ross-Ho, whose large-scale sculptures, staged environments, and uncanny translations of domestic and studio life have made her a vital presence in contemporary art. Recorded in Chicago around her latest exhibition, the conversation spans everything from monumental t-shirts to the politics of labor, and from the intimacy of the studio to the spectacle of the art fair. Ross-Ho reflects on how she mines personal and collective archives, the humor and seriousness in her work, and the ways she uses scale to destabilize the familiar. We also talk about teaching, generational shifts in art-making, and what it means to sustain a practice over the long haul.   Listen & Follow   Amanda Ross-Ho - https://hammer.ucla.edu/made-la-2025/amanda-ross-ho @amandarossho   Name-Drop  Amanda Ross-Ho — https://www.miandn.com/artists/amanda-ross-ho | @amandarossho Mitchell-Innes & Nash (Gallery) — https://www.miandn.com | @miandn_gallery Cherry and Martin (Gallery) — https://www.artforum.com/news/los-angeless-cherry-and-martin-gallery-closes-237707/ MoCA Cleveland — https://www.mocacleveland.org/ | @mocacleveland Whitney Biennial — https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-biennial | @whitneymuseum Art Basel — https://www.artbasel.com/?lang=en | @artbasel Frieze Art Fair — https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london | @friezeofficial Los Angeles art scene / UCLA — https://www.arts.ucla.edu | @uclarts EXPO CHICAGO - https://www.expochicago.com/ Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

  This week, we print big or go home. Bad at Sports cast their eyes to New York from the safe confines of the Chicago Architectural Biennial booth at EXPO 2025 to talk with the legendary Two Palms studio in the guise of Alex Slattery. If you've ever stood slack-jawed in front of a monoprint the size of a small car or a woodblock cut so large it needed its own logistics plan, chances are Two Palms was behind it. Since the 1990s, David Lasry and company have been redefining what printmaking can be—working with artists like Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Peyton, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Terry Winters, Chris Ofili, Dana Schutz, Richard Prince, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, and yes, even channeling the ghost of Andy Warhol. From delicate gestures to total madness with ink and paper, the studio's collaborations are as unpredictable as they are radical. We talk risk, scale, failure, and discovery—the alchemy of artist–printer collaborations that make Two Palms a force in contemporary art. Along the way we wander through stories of impossible woodblocks, ink disasters turned into triumphs, and why printmaking might just be the most punk medium of them all. So pour a glass, sharpen your barens, and get ready to nerd out about the future of prints.   Two Palms https://www.twopalms.us/ @twopalmsnyc   Name-Drop  Carroll Dunham — https://www.presenhuber.com/artists/carroll-dunham#tab:slideshow Elizabeth Peyton — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/elizabeth-peyton Mel Bochner — http://www.melbochner.net/ Cecily Brown — https://gagosian.com/artists/cecily-brown/ Terry Winters —https://www.terrywinters.org/ Chris Ofili — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/chris-ofili/survey Dana Schutz — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/dana-schutz Richard Prince — http://www.richardprince.com/ Chuck Close — https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/chuck-close/ Jeff Koons — https://www.jeffkoons.com/ Two Palms — https://www.twopalms.us/ Marilyn Minter — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/marilyn-minter Stanley Whitney — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/stanley-whitney Ana Benaroya — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/ana-benaroya David Paul Lasry — https://www.nga.gov/artists/21067-david-paul-lasry Alex Slattery — https://www.instagram.com/alexslattery/ EXPO CHICAGO - https://www.expochicago.com/ Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/ Institutions that love these prints: Whitney Museum of American Art — https://whitney.org/ MoMA — https://www.moma.org/ The Met — https://www.metmuseum.org/  

Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller drive up to the Dunn Museum in Libertyville, IL to talk with legendary comics painter Alex Ross. Known for Marvels, Kingdom Come, and decades of redefining superhero realism, Ross reflects on his career trajectory, his education at the American Academy of Art, his influences (from Neal Adams to Dave McKean), his early breaks with Now Comics and Leo Burnett storyboarding, and his transition into large-scale mural projects for Marvel and DC. The conversation ranges from comics history, realism in superhero depictions, variant cover economics, the physicality of superheroes, to America's appetite for dystopian narratives versus a return to the “pure Superman.” Ross is candid, funny, and deeply reflective about the comics medium, painting, and storytelling.     Name-Drop List Artists & Writers Alex Ross — https://www.alexrossart.com/ | @alexrossart Neal Adams – https://nealadams.com/ George Pérez – https://www.tcj.com/george-perez-1954-2022/ Jack Kirby – https://kirbymuseum.org/ Dave McKean – https://www.davemckean.com/ Neil Gaiman — neilgaiman.com | @neilhimself Chris Ware – https://art21.org/artist/chris-ware/ Jim Lee — https://www.dc.com/talent/jim-lee @jimlee Todd McFarlane — https://mcfarlane.com/ @toddmcfarlane Erik Larsen — https://imagecomics.com/creators/erik-larsen  @eriklarsen1138 John Tobias (Mortal Kombat) – https://www.mobygames.com/person/3326/john-tobias/ Tim Bradstreet — https://www.splashpageart.com/artistgalleryroom.asp?artistid=83 @timbradstreet Frank Casey (Ross's Superman model) – chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/The%20process_Ross%20at%20work.pdf Institutions & Companies Dunn Museum (Libertyville, IL) — https://www.lcfpd.org/museum/ @lcfpd Marvel Comics — marvel.com | @marvel DC Comics — dc.com | @dccomics American Academy of Art (Chicago) — Leo Burnett (advertising) – https://dev.leoburnett.com/ Now Comics (Chicago, defunct) Eclipse Comics (defunct) FASA (publisher of Shadowrun, BattleTech) – https://shop.fasagames.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=68 Mortal Kombat franchise — https://www.mortalkombat.com/en-us  @mortalkombat Pop Culture References Kingdom Come (DC) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(comics) Marvels (Marvel) – https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-marvels/umc.cmc.6nb1ii3n99o7rewjyq8whcsuu Shadowrun RPG – https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/collections/shadowrun Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade The Boys (Amazon Prime) – https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Boys/0KRGHGZCHKS920ZQGY5LBRF7MA Invincible (Image Comics / Amazon) – https://www.amazon.com/INVINCIBLE-SEASON-1/dp/B08WJN83XZ Peacemaker (HBO) – https://www.hbomax.com/shows/peacemaker-2022/a939d96b-7ffb-4481-96f6-472838d104ca Brightburn (film) – https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/brightburn/umc.cmc.4pkvqa1b6mf30wtx66vor37fq Image: John Weinstein

In Part Two of our late-night conversation, Bad at Sports digs deeper into the remarkable trajectory of Kenny Schachter. From law school dropout to autodidact philosopher, from Sotheby's bidder to artist and teacher, Schachter traces the unlikely path that brought him into the heart of the art world — a place he insists remains strangely conservative despite all its pretenses of progress. The discussion moves between personal history and systemic critique. Schachter recounts the role of art in surviving trauma, loss, and addiction, and why surrounding himself with works by others has been both solace and education. He reflects on the stubborn conservatism of the market, celebrity crossovers from Johnny Depp to Julian Schnabel, and the tension between wanting freedom and the systems that resist it. For Schachter, art is both a lifeline and a way to comment on the world's chaos — a practice rooted in generosity, curiosity, and contradiction. This episode captures him at his most reflective and most biting, moving from humor to vulnerability and back again. Highlights • Schachter's first encounters with Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Frankenthaler at the National Gallery. • The shock of Andy Warhol's estate sale in 1988. • Dealer-to-dealer hustling as an unlikely entry into art. • Why “there are no rules” is his best definition of being an artist. • The paradox of an art world that markets rebellion but runs on tradition. Names Dropped Andy Warhol I.M. Pei, https://www.pcf-p.com/about/i-m-pei/ Chase Manhattan Bank, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/about/art-collection Christie's, https://www.christies.com/en Sotheby's, https://www.sothebys.com/en/ Phillips Auction House, https://www.phillips.com/ Patrick Drahi, https://www.artnews.com/art-collectors/top-200-profiles/patrick-drahi/ Leonard Lauder, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/leonard-lauder-sothebys-klimt-matisse-1234751922/ The Pritzker family, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pritzker-art-collection-sothebys-breuer-1234751864/ Elaine Wynn, https://www.christies.com/en/events/the-collection-of-elaine-wynn Wyatt Kline, https://unframed.lacma.org/2014/01/28/contemporary-friends-acquire-ten-new-works-by-artists-from-around-the-world Alex Burns, Felix Reuter (Ryder), https://felixreuter.bandcamp.com/ Guerrilla Girls, https://www.guerrillagirls.com/ Old Friends Gallery, https://www.oldfriendsgallery.com/ David Letterman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Letterman The Suburban, http://www.thesuburban.org/

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller find themselves in Chicago with curator Bianca Bova and the indefatigable Kenny Schachter — artist, writer, teacher, collector, and provocateur. What begins as a conversation about Schachter's exhibition at Old Friends Gallery — featuring chicken-assisted artworks and bronze casts forged in Slovenia — quickly expands into a meditation on the art world itself. Schachter reflects on his collaborations, his obsession with foundries, and his refusal to keep resources secret. The group debates the zero-sum mentality of the art market, why artists sabotage themselves, and how absurd projects (sometimes with actual chickens) can be the most serious acts of art-making. Equal parts candid and comedic, the conversation cuts across auctions, art fairs, and the everyday realities of teaching. Expect reflections on generosity vs. gatekeeping, the fragility of the art system, and what it means to make art that is more conceptual than commercial. Highlights • Chickens as collaborators and muses. • The foundry in Slovenia that casts Rudolf Stingel's panels. • Why keeping fabricators secret is a sign of weakness. • Auctions as democratizing, even anarchic, art spaces. • The necessity of art in a divided and compassion-starved world. Names Dropped Kenny Scharf, https://kennyscharf.com/ Kenny Schachter, https://www.kennyschachter.art/ Bianca Bova, https://www.biancabovagallery.com/ Billy Connolly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Connolly Rudolf Stingel, https://gagosian.com/artists/rudolf-stingel/ Tobias Rehberger, https://pedrocera.com/artists/tobias-rehberger Paul Thek, https://whitney.org/exhibitions/paul-thek Giacometti, https://www.moma.org/artists/2141-alberto-giacometti Jerry Saltz, https://nymag.com/author/jerry-saltz/ Cy Twombly, https://cytwombly.org/ Jasper Johns, https://whitney.org/artists/653 Robert Rauschenberg, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/ Joan Mitchell, https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell Helen Frankenthaler, https://gagosian.com/artists/helen-frankenthaler/ Georgia O'Keeffe, https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/ Andy Warhol, https://www.warhol.org/ Joseph Beuys, https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/joseph-beuys Sigmar Polke, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sigmar-polke-2213 John Cage, https://www.johncage.org/ Devendra Banhart, https://devendrabanhart.com/ Brad Pitt, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/19/brad-pitt-debuts-his-sculptures-in-finland Cindy Sherman, https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/cindy-sherman/ Robert Longo, https://www.robertlongo.com/ Julian Schnabel, https://www.julianschnabel.com/ Old Friends Gallery, https://www.oldfriendsgallery.com/

This week, Bad at Sports reconnects with one of Chicago's most beloved curators and cultural instigators Ox-Bow School of Art's Executive Director, Shannon Stratton. From founding Threewalls to serving as Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, Stratton's career is a masterclass in weaving together artists, audiences, and institutions. We talk about building spaces for experimental practices, sustaining feminist and craft-centered discourse, and what it means to return to Chicago after reshaping the curatorial conversation nationally. Stratton dives into the ethics of hospitality, the politics of craft, and why sometimes the most radical thing you can do is set the table. Recorded live at EXPO 2025 in the loving space provided by the Chicago Architectural Biennial 2025 Photo by Dominique Muñoz @domo23   Name-Drop Shannon R. Stratton - https://www.shannonraestratton.com/about Threewalls — https://three-walls.org/ Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) —https://madmuseum.org/ Haystack Mountain School of Crafts —https://www.haystack-mtn.org/ MCA Chicago — https://mcachicago.org/ Textile Society of America —https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/ The Center for Craft — https://www.centerforcraft.org/ Naomi Beckwith (curator) — https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/staff/naomi-beckwith Julia Bryan-Wilson (art historian) — https://arthistory.columbia.edu/content/julia-bryan-wilson Jenni Sorkin (art historian) — https://arthistory.ucsb.edu/people/jenni-sorkin EXPO CHICAGO - https://www.expochicago.com/ Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

This week Bad at Sports goes full meta, talking about talking about art. We sit down with Ben Davis, National Art Critic for Artnet News and author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, to unpack the state of art criticism in 2025. Davis has been one of the sharpest voices charting the relationship between culture, economics, and media—at once insider, outsider, and always keeping his mom in mind. From the collapse of traditional publishing to the weird vacuum left by social media, Davis doesn't just describe the cracks in the system—he names them, theorizes them, and points to where something new might emerge. We talk ZIRP (zero-interest-rate phenomena), the rise of click-driven media, what AI means for art, and why communities matter more than markets. Listen & Follow Ben Davis on Artnet News - https://news.artnet.com/search/Ben+Davis  @benstoppable https://www.benadavis.com/ Name-Drop Artnet News — news.artnet.com https://news.artnet.com/search/ Brooklyn Rail — brooklynrail.org AI / ChatGPT — openai.com/chatgpt Neil Young — neilyoungarchives.com Slayer — slayer.net   Image care of... https://c4aa.org/our-research/interviews/ben-davis/  

Recorded live from the Chicago Architectural Biennial's booth at EXPO Chicago, Bad at Sports tailgates with artist Edra Soto and designer Dan Sullivan—Chicago's unofficial art-world power couple. Soto unpacks her first solo art fair booth at Engage Projects, where monoblock plastic chairs, airbrushed T-shirts, and Puerto Rican vernacular architecture collide with memory, loss, and celebration. Sullivan, founder of Navillus Woodworks, riffs on craft, Ikea hacks, and the business of making high-end furniture while moonlighting as Soto's collaborator and fabricator. "Dan helps." What starts as a playful conversation about paparazzi, beer coolers, and chairs spirals into a meditation on grief, Puerto Rican cultural identity, and the design politics of everyday objects. Along the way, we hit Bad Bunny, the Bear restaurant, euphemisms around death, Catholic ritual, and the French (yes, the French). We close out with music talk—Sullivan on his bands Nadnavillus and Arriver—and a standing invitation for Bad at Sports to share the stage. Death, dying, lawn chairs, and punk rock. Welcome to EXPO. Artists & Designers Edra Soto Instagram: @edrasoto https://edrasoto.com/home.html Dan Sullivan / Navillus Woodworks Instagram: @navillus_woodworks https://navilluswoodworks.com/ Ryan Peter Miller Instagram: @ryanpetermiller http://ryanpetermiller.com/ Miguel Aguilar (Kane One) Instagram: @kane_one_   kane-1.com https://www.3arts.org/artist/miguel-aguilar/ Susan Gomes George Ortiz Instagram: @georgeortizphotography https://www.georgeortizphotography.com/ Bad Bunny Instagram: @badbunnypr  https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/459095/bad-bunny-puerto-rico-residency-history Institutions / Venues / Events Engage Projects Instagram: @engageprojects https://www.engage-projects.com/   Chicago Architecture Biennial Instagram: @chicagoarchitecturebiennial https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/   EXPO Chicago Instagram: @expochicago  expochicago.com WBEZ Instagram: @wbezchicago  wbez.org/about  105.5 FM Lumpen Radio (WLPN‑LP) Instagram: @lumpenradio   lumpenradio.com  The Franklin (project space) Instagram: @thefranklinoutdoor (site-run by Edra Soto & Dan Sullivan)  https://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/ABOUT The Bear restaurant (Sullivan furniture) This refers to the TV show The Bear on FX,  Art Basel Instagram: @artbasel artbasel.com The Armory Show Instagram: @thearmoryshow  thearmoryshow.com NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) Instagram: @newartdealers  newartdealers.org  Color Factory Instagram: @colorfactoryco  colorfactory.co  Electrical Audio (recording studio) Instagram: @electricalaudio  Tenement Museum (NYC) Instagram: @thetenementmuseum  https://www.tenement.org/  Cultural Figures & References Yolanda, Lucetta, Anita (Puerto Rican celebs) Gilberto Santa Rosa Lil' Kim, Lil' Romeo, Neil Young, Slayer, Jeff Koons   Bands & Music Navilus (Dan Sullivan's project) https://navilluswoodworks.com/ Arriver (art-metal band) image courtesy of Engage Projects

In this lively and insightful episode, Bad at Sports hosts a roundtable conversation with Dirk Denison (Founding Board Member of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB)), David Salkin (Designer, Curator, and Board Husband), and Jennifer Armetta (Executive Director of the CAB). Together, they reflect on the impact and legacy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and its shifting forms of experimentation, urbanism, and civic engagement. The episode explores the curatorial frameworks of CAB, the roles of education and public space, and how architecture becomes a lens through which cities reimagine themselves. Names Dropped: - Dirk Denison - David Salkin - Jennifer Armetta - Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) - Venice Architecture Biennial  - CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal - CAB 6: Shift - Chicago Architecture Center - Graham Foundation - Studio Gang - MASS Design Group - Jeanne Gang - Open House Chicago – Burnham – Frank Llyod Wright – the ID at IIT – Mies – Louis Sullivian  - Professor Landis - Rahm Emmanuel

We meet Paul Pfeiffer inside his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to talk about ghosts, spectacle, and the metaphysics of sports. Known for erasing athletes from footage and turning stadiums into stages of worship, Pfeiffer opens up about boxing as performance, the haunted loop of fandom, and building media rituals in the Philippines. Also: parrots, Deion Sanders, lip sync monks, and the death of the moment.   Names dropped: Deion Sanders - https://www.instagram.com/deionsanders/?hl=en  Manny Pacquiao - mannypacquiao.ph The Bible (yes, the text) - https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/hail-satan?srsltid=AfmBOoqTwkeDSDwxOmlvVLQX8QQduw8ehfzt3sYzUMFMvJO-_ym35hOg Tom Gunning - https://cms.uchicago.edu/people/tom-gunning Joshua Oppenheimer - https://cream.ac.uk/people/josh-oppenheimer/  DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) - djspooky.com Gina Osterloh - ginaosterloh.com Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - mcachicago.org Biennale of Sydney - biennaleofsydney.art Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver - cagvancouver.org

We sit down with curator Rachel Adams to talk about institutional evolution, artists as infrastructure, and how curatorial practice shifts between museums and biennials. Rachel reflects on working with artists like Cauleen Smith, Liz Magic Laser, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, the power of slow curation, and why she's drawn to hybrid spaces that defy the market. Along the way: phantom titles, artist contracts, Minneapolis moments, and a manifesto in a box of ice cream bars. Cauleen Smith cauleensmith.com   Liz Magic Laser lizmagiclaser.com   Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lima.art   Candice Hopkins indigenousnewyork.org   Nato Thompson https://www.natothompson.com/about   Christina Vassallo columbusmuseum.org   Sarah Schultz mplsart.com   Alison Hearst themodern.org   Andrea Andersson riversinstitute.org   Franklin Sirmans pamm.org   Mary Jane Jacob https://never-the-same.org/interviews/mary-jane-jacob/   Independent Curators International (ICI) curatorsintl.org   image: Asad Raza, Orientation, 2022. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Field Studio.

We sit down with a delegation of Irish curators—Michele Horrigan (Askeaton Contemporary Arts), Michael Hill (Temple Bar Gallery + Studios), and Mark O'Gorman (The Complex)—to unpack what it means to build artist-centered institutions on an island without a commercial art market. From weather-worn banana warehouses to smoke-machine-filled nightclubs, these curators share space-making tactics, post-colonial entanglements, and the challenges of caring for artists without selling to collectors. They're in Chicago for EXPO and bringing the heat—with nothing but friendship, found neon, and deeply site-responsive shows. Also: fluorescent hands, oak horns, grant hustle, and Duchampian office doors Names Dropped: Lilian Pettinicchi / Lilian Peto – No official site found Anya McBride – Devin Mays – https://regardsgallery.com/artists/devin-mays/ Haynes Riley / Good Weather – https://www.goodweather.llc Becky Nahum (ICA) – No profile confirmed Stephanie Smith – https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/4391-stephanie-smith Kate Sierzputowski – https://katesierzputowski.com Amanda Rice – https://www.instagram.com/p/Cx2lfLmL_Qk Frank Wasser – https://www.instagram.com/frankwasserartist Briony Dunne – https://www.instagram.com/bryonymaydunne Olga Balema – https://www.clearing-gallery.com/artists/olga-balema Hannah Hoffman Gallery – https://www.instagram.com/hannahhoffmangallery Bridget Donahue Gallery – https://www.bridgetdonahue.nyc John Latham / Flat Time House – http://www.flattimeho.org.uk Brian Doherty – Tom Friedman – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Friedman Duchamp (Marcel) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp The Smiths (band) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smiths Website/IG Handles (if available or mentioned): ·       Askeaton Contemporary Arts / @askeatonarts ·       Temple Bar Gallery + Studios / @templebargallery ·       The Complex Dublin / @thecomplexdublin ·       Good Weather / @goodweathergallery

Live from Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago In this intimate, laughter-filled episode recorded live at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Duncan and Ryan sit down with artists Jaqueline Cedar and Josh Dihle on the occasion of their concurrent solo exhibitions. The conversation traverses everything from Duchampian bathroom jokes to model train nostalgia, parenthood, masculinity, and why drawing still matters. We dig deep into Cedar's intimate, narrative-rich figure paintings and Dihle's large, toy-like sculptural paintings, both brimming with color, play, and strange tenderness. Along the way, we explore the value of humor, discomfort, labor, scale, and why both artists moonlight as gallerists—Cedar with the roving Good Naked Gallery and Dihle with events at Color Club and The Sugar Hole ice cream shop. It's a heartfelt meditation on art, joy, burnout, and why we keep making. Name Drop List & Related Links Jaqueline Cedar Website | Instagram Good Naked Gallery – Instagram Josh Dihle Website | Instagram Color Club – Website | The Sugar Hole Andrew Rafacz Gallery Website | Instagram Artists & References: Roger Brown Suellen Rocca David Hockney Henry Moore Pieter Bruegel the Elder Duchamp's “Étant donnés” Julius Caesar Gallery (Chicago)  

Live from the tailgate lounge at Chicago Architectural Biennial 6's booth at Expo Chicago, Duncan and Ryan welcome Joey Orr, the newly appointed Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the MCA Chicago. In this densely brilliant and surprisingly hilarious conversation, Orr discusses what it means to steer a contemporary art institution in an era of deep social complexity, political polarization, and shifting museum ethics. We cover everything from the social life of objects to the lore of performance documentation, and even pitch a game show based on the varied memories of Chris Burden's early MCA performance. Orr reflects on social practice, audience authorship, and why curators are public servants—not VIPs. We get deep into what it means to be a meat sack in space, how to radicalize museum engagement, and why reenactments may just be the key to future institutional magic. This is art talk that grinds, gropes, and glows in the dark. No hot dogs, just conceptual fireworks.   Joey Orr – Deputy Director and Chief Curator at MCA Chicago IG: @joeyorr13 Bio: https://joeyorr.com/about/ Chris Burden – Performance artist Wiki: Chris Burden John Cage – Composer and performance artist Wiki: John Cage Resource: John Cage Trust Dick Higgins – Intermedia artist and Fluxus co-founder Wiki: Dick Higgins Alison Knowles – Fluxus artist IG: @alisonknowlesartist Wiki: Alison Knowles Mary Jane Jacob – Curator of public art and socially engaged practice Wiki: Mary Jane Jacob Bio: SAIC Faculty Page Pablo Helguera – Artist and educator working in socially engaged art IG: @pablo_helguera Website: pablohelguera.net Book: Education for Socially Engaged Art Diana Taylor – Performance theorist; author of The Archive and the Repertoire Profile: NYU Performance Studies Book Info: Duke University Press Naomi Beckwith – Curator, formerly at MCA and Guggenheim IG: @naomibx Article: Guggenheim Chief Curator Announcement MCA Chicago (Museum of Contemporary Art) Website: mcachicago.org IG: @mcachicago School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Website: saic.edu IG: @saic_news High Museum of Art (Atlanta) Website: high.org IG: @highmuseumofart The Louvre Website: louvre.fr IG: @museelouvre Queens Museum Website: queensmuseum.org IG: @queensmuseum Fluxus – Movement reference MoMA: Fluxus Overview - https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/fluxus#:~:text=Founded%20by%20George%20Maciunas%20and,to%20integrate%20art%20and%20life.    

Broadcast live from Rice University (yes, in Houston), this episode of Bad at Sports brings together the curator of comics and cartoon art at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Caitlin McGurk, and the Richmond-based zine publisher and comics obsessive behind Bubbles Fanzine, Brian Baynes. We dive deep into McGurk's new book Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund, a biography and art book reclaiming one of the first women to work for The New Yorker. McGurk details her decade-long research process, Shermund's punk rock lifestyle in the 1920s, and the bittersweet reclamation of her uncredited legacy. In the second half, we sit down with Brian Baynes, who champions comics culture from the DIY trenches. He shares his mission behind Bubbles, how it draws on punk zine culture, why it stays in print forever, and how he's preserving overlooked voices from India to local comic shops. From feminist cartoon history to cassette-label archaeology and typewriter ribbon obsession, this one's a love letter to the weird, wonderful, and un-archived margins of visual culture. Names Dropped: Caitlin McGurk – Curator at Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, author of Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins Brian Baynes – Publisher of Bubbles zine Bubbles Zine – Indie comics fanzine Barbara Shermund – Early New Yorker cartoonist and subject of McGurk's book Spain Rodriguez – Underground cartoonist who created Granny McGurk The New Yorker – Home of Shermund's work in the 1920s–40s Rea Irvin  – The New Yorker's founding art director Harold Ross – Founding editor of The New Yorker Art Students League of New York – Where Shermund studied California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute, recently closed) – Shermund's California alma mater Hearst Newspapers – Syndicated Shermund's comic strip Maximum Rocknroll – Long-running punk zine Punk Planet – Chicago-based punk zine, aesthetic cousin of Bad at Sports Soft Boys / Archer Prewitt – Musician and cartoonist interviewed in Bubbles Ludwig Wittgenstein – Language philosopher referenced by Baynes Cameron Arthur – Cartoonist behind The Hidden Islands Anand Radhakrishnan – Likely creator of Stories from Zoo (not named directly, based on context) Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum – At Ohio State University, world's largest cartoon archive Overlooked No More (Barbara Shermund) – NYT's obituary project

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller cruise their way into a murder mansion fever dream with Jake Nickell and Lance Curran, two of the minds behind Threadless—the Chicago-based t-shirt empire that helped invent crowdsourced artwear before we'd marketed terms like “creator economy” or “drop ship.” What begins as a nostalgia trip (setting the stage for how the business developed through DIY screenprinting and forum culture) quickly becomes a deep dive into ethics, art careers, AI disruption, licensing chaos, and why having your work sold in Hot Topic definitely still counts as making it. We unpack: The founding of Threadless on a secret art/code forum Shifting from screen printing to digital on-demand Working with artists, bands, and comic book creators Parody vs. IP theft (and WTF the DMCA is) Building safety and anti-hate moderation into a global platform Why Chicago still rules And why Punch Nazis continues to be a top seller Along the way, we also discuss vending machines, Karl Marx, Cheetos, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, and what happens when art school turns into a startup. And, importantly, how capitalism can be leveraged using Foucauldian power for artists—rather than for their subjugation. Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, and a pioneer in crowdsourced design and artist-first merchandise models. He started Threadless in 2000 while still in art school. Lance Curran is the VIP Accounts Director at Threadless, a longtime champion of artist partnerships, muralist collaborations, and weird comic book projects. He joined the company in 2005 and once described the warehouse as “the Foot Clan layer from Ninja Turtles.” Names Dropped: Jake Nickell Lance Curran Threadless Tony Moore The Walking Dead Hot Topic Hope for the Day The Trevor Project Redbox Columbia College Chicago Four Seasons Total Landscaping Nathan Fielder Disney Warner Bros. Universal Studios Marvel Harvard Business School Case Study on Threadless Silicon Valley Chicago Art Scene

Recorded live at the Comics Without Borders / Sans Frontières gathering at Rice University, this episode dives deep into international comics publishing, aesthetic risk-taking, and how underground networks drive a truly global comics culture. David Schilter, publisher and editor of Latvia's acclaimed kuš! comics, joins us alongside Pedro Vieira de Moura, Portuguese critic, writer, and co-founder of the bookstore/gallery Mundo Fantasma. We talk about how a small-format anthology changed Latvian comics forever, why RAW magazine changed Pedro's life, and how comics have always been a place for outsiders to find their people. It's about pornographic comics, lipstick in mirrors, misnumbered anthologies, institutional resistance, aesthetic weirdness, bookstores as public educators, and why no one in Latvia is publishing Maus.   Guest Links: kuš! comics (David Schilter): https://www.komikss.lv Pedro Vieira de Moura: http://www.laboratori.net Mundo Fantasma (Porto bookstore/gallery): https://www.mundofantasma.pt   Names Dropped: Art Spiegelman – Creator of Maus, influence on RAW magazine: Art Spiegelman on Wikipedia Barbara Shermund – queer comics history: Barbara Shermund Basil Wolverton – Iconic MAD magazine illustrator: Basil Wolverton on Wikipedia Charles Burns – Known for Black Hole and RAW magazine: Charles Burns on Wikipedia Gary Panter – RAW magazine artist, punk comics icon: Gary Panter on Wikipedia Al Jaffee – Fold-in master at MAD Magazine: Al Jaffee on Wikipedia Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli – Daredevil and Batman: Year One: Frank Miller David Mazzucchelli Moebius – Legendary French comics artist: Moebius on Wikipedia Neil Adams, George Pérez, Jim Lee –  Scott McCloud – Author of Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro – Early Portuguese cartoonist and comic pioneer David B. – French cartoonist and co-founder of L'Association: David B. on Wikipedia Adrian Tomine – Acclaimed alternative cartoonist: Adrian Tomine Marjane Satrapi – Creator of Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi Brian Baynes – Publisher of Bubbles Zine: Bubbles Zine

In this episode, we sit down with architect, editor, and curator Florencia Rodriguez, Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 6. We dig into the ideas shaping this year's edition—titled “Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change”—and her approach to curating a biennial that centers transformation, public space, and critical imagination. Rodriguez reflects on her journey from Buenos Aires to Chicago, the founding of PLOT and SOILED, and her evolving relationship to criticism as both practice and provocation. We explore how writing and curating can act as architectural tools, shaping not only discourse but the environments we inhabit. We also soft-launch Bad at Sports' partnership with CAB 6—an evolving audio collaboration that will track the biennial's voices, urgencies, and ideas throughout the year. Mentioned in this episode: Chicago Architecture Biennial CAB 6: Shift – Architecture in Times of Radical Change Florencia Rodriguez – SOILED Florencia Rodriguez – PLOT Journal (Spanish/archived)