Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 938: Tori Tinsley
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 937: Nato Thompson
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 935: Chicago Critics Roundtable
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 934: John Stezaker
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 933: Kate Sierzputowski and EXPO Chicago 2026
Bad at Sports
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...
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Bad at Sports Episode 932: Michi Meko
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...
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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...
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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...
info_outlineRecorded 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/