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Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, the series focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.
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- 1 weeks ago1h 16m
Bad at Sports Episode 969: Abby Pucker and Chanelle Lacy... It's Cool to Care?
What if the problem with Chicago's art world isn't a shortage of artists, galleries, institutions, or ideas—but a shortage of connective tissue? This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie sits down at the Gertie Hub with Gertie founder Abby Pucker and Head of Programming, Partnerships & Membership Chanelle Lacy for a conversation about building audiences, building collectors, and building cultural infrastructure in Chicago. The story starts with Gertie's origin: Abby's long-running interest in getting people into the same room, her return to Chicago during COVID, and a listening tour that revealed a strange contradiction. Chicago had museums, galleries, artists, spaces, and ambitious programming everywhere—but plenty of people still felt like they had nowhere to go and no way into the culture. Gertie emerged as an attempt to close that gap. From there, the conversation becomes a much bigger argument about Chicago. Why does the city produce so many remarkable artists and cultural workers while remaining so difficult for mid-career artists to sustain? When does Chicago's legendary self-reliance become a silo? What happens when "we don't care what New York thinks" stops being freedom and starts becoming a defensive posture? And what kind of infrastructure would make it easier for artists to stay, return, grow, and find audiences here? That leads directly into Chicago Exhibition Week, running September 14–20, 2026: Gertie's citywide effort to make Chicago's existing cultural ecosystem radically easier to enter. Abby and Chanelle talk maps, directories, marketing, partnerships, galleries, museums, new collectors, and the deceptively difficult work of getting people off Instagram and through the door. Along the way, Duncan asks the most basic—and maybe hardest—question: what is the value argument for art? Chanelle answers that art lets us see the world through someone else's eyes and creates a context for difficult conversations. Abby talks about curiosity, connection, discovery, and the pleasure of feeling "in on" a cultural conversation. All three keep circling the same problem: who is building new art fans now? The discussion also wanders happily through Riot Fest, music-festival graphics, the Armory, Coachella, Lollapalooza, art fairs, neighborhood galleries, collecting, Chicago parking, and the possibility of turning a finance professional into an art freak. Then the radio fades out... In the internet-only nugget, the conversation gets into the brass tacks: Gertie Curious and Gertie Curated, membership programming, collection and studio visits, cultural travel, and the relationship between membership and the organization's public-facing work. From there, Abby and Duncan go deep on a question Bad at Sports has wrestled with for years: why build a cultural organization as a for-profit instead of a nonprofit? That opens a long discussion about philanthropy, grants, mission creep, institutional agility, donor power, KPIs, governance, learned dependency, the economics of culture, and whether an art industry can be sustained almost entirely by galleries, auction houses, and charitable giving. The answer, at least here, is not especially tidy—which is why it is worth listening to. It may, however, begin with Abby's simplest proposition: It's cool to care. NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING Guests / Gertie Gertie — https://www.gertie.co/ Abby Pucker / Chanelle Lacy / Gertie team — https://www.gertie.co/about Gertie membership — https://www.gertie.co/membership Gertie Instagram — @gertie.chicago — https://www.instagram.com/gertie.chicago/ Chicago Exhibition Week Chicago Exhibition Week 2026 — September 14–20, 2026 — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/ CXW 2026 map — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/2026-map Gertie exhibitions discussed</sp
- 2 weeks ago1h 14m
Bad at Sports Episode 968: Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete — It's About Time
What if the most radical thing an artist can do right now is… take their time? This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with curators Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete, a.k.a. DRAW, to talk about their recent GRAY Chicago exhibition, IT'S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago. Originally conceived under the much more dangerous title "Slacker Conceptualism," the exhibition gathers ten Chicago-based or Chicago-trained artists around a shared suspicion of productivity, professionalism, polish, legibility, self-branding, and the endless demand that artists explain themselves. The conversation starts with artists who take years to finish paintings, lean things against walls rather than attach them, make objects that seem almost perversely uninterested in becoming commodities, and cultivate what Abigail and Dieter call a kind of "studied nonchalance." From there, things get bigger. What does it mean to make political art without making your politics immediately legible? What happens when opacity becomes an act of resistance? Can refusing productivity itself be political? Why does Chicago—with its strange combination of universities, affordable-ish space, artist-run culture, deep pedagogical histories, and relative distance from the market machinery of New York—make this particular kind of artistic life possible? Along the way we get Pope.L, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Michael Asher, Bas Jan Ader, Josef Strau, Cologne in the 1990s, Gen-X slackerdom, cringe comedy, unfinished paintings, unopened packages, boats, sawhorses, kitchen cabinets, artist losers, artist attitudes, the fetish of identity, the problem with virtue signaling, and the revolutionary possibility of simply refusing to hustle. And then the radio turns off. In the web-only afterparty, the conversation expands into earlier generations of Chicago conceptualism, center-versus-periphery arguments, the weird provincialism of assuming New York remains the center of American art, and finally the uncomfortable relationship between art schools, enormous tuition bills, professionalization, and the economic pressure placed on young artists to turn artistic practice into a viable career. Is the artist supposed to produce? Explain? Sell? Educate? Perform an identity? Change the world? Or can you just be an artist? Apparently, in Chicago, you can at least try. NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING The exhibition IT'S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago — GRAY Chicago, July 10–August 22, 2026. Exhibition text, artists, checklist, installation views, and curatorial essay: GRAY — IT'S ABOUT TIME DRAW — the curatorial collaboration of Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete. The exhibition page includes biographies of both curators: DRAW / GRAY exhibition page Curators Abigail Winograd — independent curator and writer; co-curator/co-commissioner of Jeffrey Gibson's 2024 U.S. Pavilion and former Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow: Abigail Winograd — Neubauer Collegium Dieter Roelstraete — curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago; former MCA Chicago curator and documenta 14 curatorial team member: Dieter Roelstraete — Neubauer Collegium Artists in IT'S ABOUT TIME Alex Chitty: alexchitty.com Shir Ende: shirende.com Max Guy: maxguy.studio Jinn Bronwen Lee: jinnbronwenlee.com Dave Lloyd — see the GRAY exhibition page for works and inst
- 2 weeks ago30 min
Bad at Sports Episode 967: Georgia Kotretsos with Daniel Tucker
Blurb: Daniel Tucker interviews Georgia Kotretsos about her work with the ΤΗΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ SOCIETY which is conceived of as a Arts & Culture Research Lab Observatorium with projects throughout Greece and beyond. This interview was conducted at the Twenty-First International Conference on the Arts in Society conference "Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies" at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Bio: Georgia Kotretsos is a visual artist, researcher, the founder of the nonprofit organization THE ΤΕΛΟΣ SOCIETY, Arts & Culture Research Lab Observatorium, in Athens, Greece and the publisher of TTS Press, which operates in the field of cultural studies and art research in Greece, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. TTS focuses on the Greek periphery, the islands, and remote areas. It creates interdisciplinary teams tailored for each project, working collaboratively on site-specific intangible projects that uncover the unique aspects of each locale. TTS publications are available at the following bookstores: Politeia, Ianos, Museum of Cycladic Art, Iambos, Pixel,and Public (online). Through these endeavors, THE TEΛΟΣ SOCIETY highlights the importance of contemporary art and cultural heritage while fostering new creative perspectives and audiences. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA, 2004), where she studied on a full merit-based scholarship, and a BFA from the Durban Institute of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (2000), where she relocated as a teenager during the country's post-apartheid transition. Her work systematically critiques conventional theoretical positions on viewing and perceiving artworks, seeking—through liberatory and anarchic visual practices—to reveal that the experience of viewing is site-specific, and that the emancipation of the viewer is a crucial source of artistic knowledge. Her research-based approach—whether in the form of artwork, text, or interview—resists traditional forms and historical modes of acquiring knowledge, proposing alternative methodologies for its creation and reception. Her work has been presented both in Greece and internationally, including at the Onassis Art Center and the Asia Society in New York, the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Tinguely Museum (Basel), La Kunsthalle (Mulhouse), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), and the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis. She has held seven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous significant international initiatives, including the 56th Venice Biennale, MediaImpact in Moscow, and FIELD MEETING in New York. From 2006 to 2010, she co-founded the independent art space Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, USA—an alternative contemporary art laboratory—and served as editor-in-chief of BootPrint, a biannual journal by and for artists. From 2009 to 2013, she served as a columnist for Art21 Magazine of PBS Arts Feature in New York, with her column Inside the Artist's Studio. In 2014, her writing was also published on LABKULTUR.TV in Germany. In 2019, Kotretsos published a report on the arts in Greece reflecting on the decade of recession 2008-18 entitled "Athens is the Only Cave in the World that has a Skylight" for the Field Journal in the US. Her works are held in private collections, including the National Bank of Greece, the Mamidakis Foundation, and others. More information about her work can be found at: www.georgiakotretsos.com | www.thetelossociety.com Georgia Kotretsos portrait for RTIN by Kostas Pappas and the TTS Logo
- Aug 17, 202658 min
Bad at Sports Episode 966: Claire Ashley
Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Claire Ashley at the Door County Contemporary Art Fair for a conversation that wanders from broken-down minivans to Scottish standing stones, from inflatable sculpture to protest aesthetics, and from the economics of artistic survival to the philosophy of color. Ashley discusses nearly two decades of building monumental inflatable sculptures that refuse to stay still—works that exist somewhere between architecture, bodies, creatures, performance, and public intervention. They explore why artists should embrace experimentation, why humor can be politically powerful, and how softness, absurdity, and vulnerability can become serious sculptural strategies. Links Claire Ashley — https://clairehelenashley.com/ Door County Contemporary Art Fair — https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/ Lee Bontecou — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Bontecou Nick Cave — https://nickcaveart.com/Main/Intro.html Paul McCarthy —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCarthy José Lerma — https://kavigupta.com/artists/42-jose-lerma/ Weisman Art Museum — https://wam.umn.edu/ Cameron Art Museum — https://cameronartmuseum.org/ Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel — https://www.saintkatearts.com/ Callanish Standing Stones — https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/calanais-standing-stones/ Isle of Lewis — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Lewis
- Aug 13, 202655 min
Bad at Sports Episode 965: Jaymee Harvey Willms
Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist, curator, arts administrator, and Door County Contemporary co-founder Jaymee Harvey Willms for an unexpectedly personal and funny conversation. What begins as a discussion about goats unfolds into an exploration of grief, religious deconstruction, contemporary art, and the rituals we create to survive profound loss. Once a painter immersed in saturated color, Jaymee found herself unable to tolerate color at all, turning instead toward broken ceramics, white paint, damaged objects, and sculptures that ask what it means for something broken to continue functioning. Links Jaymee Harvey Willms http://www.jaymeeharveywillms.com/ Door County Contemporary https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/ Familiar (Milwaukee) https://www.familiarmke.com/ Walker Art Center https://walkerart.org/ Mary Gabriel — Ninth Street Women https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell/citations/ninth-street-women Lee Krasner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Krasner Jackson Pollock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock JoAnne Carson https://joannecarson.com Adam Frelin https://adamfrelin.com Hair + Nails https://hairandnailsart.com
- Aug 10, 202656 min
Bad at Sports Episode 964: Jenal Dolson
Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, and Brian Andrews are joined by painter Jenal Dolson for a conversation recorded live from the Door County Contemporary Art Fair in Wisconsin. Dolson discusses her vividly textured paintings, her installation practice, and the role of touch, memory, and sensory experience in shaping the visual language of her work. The conversation ranges from tactile abstraction and flocked wallpaper to popcorn ceilings, raccoon vision, painting directly onto gallery walls, collaboration, titling artworks, and why artists continue making work in the first place. Links Jenal Dolson https://jenaldolson.com/home.html Andrew Rafacz Gallery https://andrewrafacz.com/ 65GRAND https://65grand.com/ Good Naked Gallery https://www.goodnakedgallery.com/ Door County Contemporary https://doorcountycontemporary.com/ Deb Sokolow https://www.debsokolow.com/ Trish Tillman https://www.trishtillman.com/ Rebecca Morris https://www.byrebeccamorris.com/ Chris Cran http://chriscran.com/
- Aug 6, 202657 min
Bad at Sports Episode 963: Tyson Reeder
Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller finally welcome painter, educator, and perennial instigator Tyson Reeder to Bad at Sports. Recorded during Door County Contemporary Art Fair, the discussion wanders through the history of Milwaukee's DIY art scene, the legendary Dark Fair, artist-run culture, teaching, painting, collaboration, and the productive tension between sincerity and absurdity. Reeder reflects on organizing exhibitions as artistic experiments rather than scholarly declarations, describing curating as "a speculative mindset" where the question is always what if? The conversation also explores painting's unique solitude, collaborative work with his brother Scott Reeder, the role of humor in contemporary art, regional artistic identity, materiality after the pandemic, why artists still need to stand in front of paintings, and how drawing together can become an antidote to digital isolation. Links Tyson Reeder https://canadanewyork.com/artists/tyson-reeder Scott Reeder https://canadanewyork.com/artists/scott-reeder Canada Gallery https://canadanewyork.com/ Door County Contemporary Art Fair https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/ Process Print Shop https://process-process.com/ Swiss Institute https://www.swissinstitute.net/ White Columns https://whitecolumns.org/ Threewalls https://three-walls.org/ Green Gallery http://www.thegreengallery.biz/ Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture https://www.skowheganart.org/
- Aug 3, 202632 min
Bad at Sports Episode 962: Sophia Chai
This week Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Sophia Chai at the Door County Contemporary Art Fair to discuss photography that insists on becoming something else. Working between painting, sculpture, installation, and large-format analog photography, Chai creates images that challenge our assumptions about perspective, representation, and the mechanics of seeing itself. The conversation moves from camera obscuras and four-by-five view cameras to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, cave painting, Korean language, immigration, and the colonial language embedded within photographic practice. Chai reflects on transforming her graduate studio into a walk-in camera obscura after September 11th, collaborating with architectural space rather than simply depicting it, and asks whether photography might become a practice of witnessing rather than capturing. Name Drops & Links Sophia Chai – https://www.sophiachai.com Hair + Nails – https://hairandnailsart.com/ University of Illinois Chicago School of Art & Art History – https://artandarthistory.uic.edu/ Kerry James Marshall – https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/kerry-james-marshall Judith Kirshner – https://stories.mcachicago.org/speaker/judith-kirshner/ Plato – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ Camera Obscura – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura Plato's Allegory of the Cave – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave Jeff Wall – https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/jeff-wall Barbara Kasten – https://barbarakasten.net/ Johannes Vermeer – https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/johannes-vermeer Peter Jackson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jackson The Lord of the Rings – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(film_series)
About Bad at Sports
Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, the series focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.
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