Bad at Sports

Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, badatsports.com focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.

Bad at Sports Episode 958: Rafael Salas 07/09/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 957: Andrew Rafacz 07/02/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 956: Phoenix Brown 06/29/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 955: Mindy Rose Schwartz 06/25/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 954: Heather Mekkelson 06/22/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 953: George Scheer 06/18/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 952: Tali Halpern 06/15/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 951: William Powhida 06/11/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 950: Justin H Long 06/08/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 949: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein 06/08/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 948: Esther Park 06/04/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 947: Heather Hubbs 06/01/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 946: Chris Succo 05/28/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 945: Dreamsong Gallery 05/25/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 944: Amy Kligman 05/21/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 943: Nanako Kono and Olivia Zubko 05/18/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 942: Embajada Gallery 05/14/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 941: Myra Greene 05/11/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 940: Emily Llamazales 04/29/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins 04/19/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 938: Tori Tinsley 04/15/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 937: Nato Thompson 04/13/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks 04/08/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks 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 — Ryan (Peter Miller) — Damon Locks — Goldfinch Gallery — Lumpen Radio — Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — Stateville Correctional Center — Artists / Art References Charles White — Raymond Pettibon — Emory Douglas — Kerry James Marshall — Music / Punk References Bad Brains — Minor Threat — Government Issue — The Clash — Siouxsie and the Banshees — The Damned — Big Black — Naked Raygun — Black Flag — Comics / Illustration Influences John Byrne — Neal Adams — George Pérez — Marshall Rogers — /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40775855

Bad at Sports Episode 935: Chicago Critics Roundtable 04/06/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 934: John Stezaker 04/03/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 933: Kate Sierzputowski and EXPO Chicago 2026 03/31/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 932: Michi Meko 03/23/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 932: Michi Meko 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 - Art Papers - Duncan MacKenzie - Brian Andrews - Louis Armstrong - Mark Rothko - Rothko Chapel - Ellsworth Kelly - Bob Ross - J. M. W. Turner - Thomas Cole - The Goat Farm Arts Center - New Orleans Savannah Gulf of Mexico /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40593875

Bad at Sports Episode 931: Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias 03/18/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 931: Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias 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 — Krystal Lemonias — Andrew Rafacz Gallery — Andrew Rafacz — Janelle Dawson — School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) — NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — EXPO Chicago — Western Exhibitions — Bazaar Magazine (France) — /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40521390

Bad at Sports Episode 930: Antonio Darden 03/10/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 930: Antonio Darden 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 – Craig Drennen – Jared Christian – Devonté Hynes – Blood Orange – Young Thug – Shawty Lo – Pastor Troy – Lil’ Kim – John P. Kee – Gillian Anderson – Dana Scully – The X-Files – Tupac Shakur – Michael Jackson – Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – Olivia Benson – Gordon Ramsay – Kitchen Nightmares – Kanye West – Bound 2 – The Ponderosa Twins Plus One – The Undertaker – Priscilla Presley – Leslie Nielsen – The Naked Gun – Cyclops – X-Men ’97 – Radcliffe Bailey – Art Papers – Fire Ecology – /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40388170

Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe 02/24/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe 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 — Barry McGee — https://www.ratio3.org/artists/barry-mcgee Chris Johanson — https://altman-siegel.com/artists/chris-johanson Jean-Michel Basquiat — Titian — Giorgione — Arthur Danto — https://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/faculty/danto.html Dr. Woo — Natalie Goldberg — Stephen King — George Saunders — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Jean-François Lyotard — Jean Baudrillard — Walker Art Center — Iowa Writers’ Workshop — Iron Maiden — Danzig — Twin Peaks — Dragonlance / Larry Elmore — New Art Dealers Alliance –– /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40216050

Bad at Sports

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