Bad At Sports

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 MacKe

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 Kentrid

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.c

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 incarcerat

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) Dun

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 imag

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 mea

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 abs

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 work

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

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

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 a

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

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

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

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 misrecogniti

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 st

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 s

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-perform

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 impo