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Bad at Sports Episode 905: The REAL Joey Orr!

Release Date: 05/29/2025

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 931: Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 930: Antonio Darden

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 928: Robert Burnier

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 927: Alfred Steiner

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 926: Gabriel Barcia-Colombo

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 925: Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____)

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 924: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein is Jerry G part 2

Bad at Sports

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...

Bad at Sports Episode 923:Jerry Gagosian aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Part 1

Bad at Sports

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...

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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.