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 as models for thinking through chaos, and into the slow time of art as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary media. Lorezetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government becomes a touchstone for considering how abstraction can carry ethical or civic attitude without becoming propaganda, and how form itself can function as content.

Throughout, Burnier frames sculpture and drawing as "sites of possibility" rather than statements—tuning forks for thought that ask viewers to complete the work through their own duration and attention.

The episode closes with talk of new material directions following a recent Pollock-Krasner grant and an ongoing commitment to work that never fully resolves, but keeps adjusting—open, provisional, and in motion.

Images courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Zulua Ĉ iela Kapo, 2025 (top) Acrylic on aluminum

Nebulaj Ćeloj (Soyinka IV), 2023 (bottom) Acrylic on aluminum

• Robert Burnier – https://www.robertburnier.com
• Andrew Rafacz Gallery – https://andrewrafacz.com
• Corvi-Mora (London) – https://www.corvi-mora.com
• Bad at Sports – https://badatsports.com
• Lumpen Radio (WLPN 105.5 FM) – https://lumpenradio.com
• Agnes Martin – https://www.moma.org/artists/3787
• Ambrogio Lorenzetti – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lorenzet/ambrogio/governme/index.html
• Bo-Kaap (Cape Town) – https://www.capetown.travel/areas/bo-kaap/
• Buddhism – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism
• Chicago Architecture Biennial – https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
• Christopher Wool – https://gagosian.com/artists/christopher-wool/
• District Six Museum – https://www.districtsix.co.za
• Oak Park, Illinois – https://www.oak-park.us
• Piet Mondrian – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/piet-mondrian-1654
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) – https://www.saic.edu
• Schopenhauer – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
• Stony Island Arts Bank – https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank
• Takashi Murakami – https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Takashi_Murakami/1
• Tarot – https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot
• Yoruba Divination (Ifá) – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ifa

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 system that constantly measures value against visibility and sales.

From there, the episode dives deep into Steiner's dual practice. As an artist, his work spans painting, language-based conceptual pieces, NFTs, and legal interventions that deliberately stress-test institutional systems. He walks through two blockchain projects that were designed to fail commercially, including one where each NFT generates a unique text based on a buyer's Ethereum address, and another where ownership includes the right to alter the work itself, opening the door to misuse, mischief, and unexpected generosity.

NFTs check in as, Steiner recounts a moment when an NFT holder copied a high-value work by Mitchell Chan, prompting Chan to respond by turning the forgery into an original drawing. The story becomes a parable about trust, legitimacy, and the strange ethics that emerge when technology destabilizes traditional ideas of originality.

The conversation touches copyright law, photography, and artificial intelligence. Steiner explains why registering a copyright still matters, even in an age of ubiquitous images, and why most photographs are protected by default despite containing little expressive decision-making. He outlines how current legal frameworks are struggling to catch up with AI training practices, predicting that future court decisions will hinge not on whether content was scraped, but on how models are used and whose markets they undermine.

Threaded throughout is a candid reflection on professional identity. Steiner speaks openly about the suspicion artists face when they have parallel careers, the romantic myth of total artistic devotion, and the quiet prejudice against artists who appear too competent, too organized, or too financially stable. Having spent years working part-time at Morrison & Foerster before founding his own firm, Steiner argues that the art world's fear of "dabblers" says more about its investment logic than about artistic seriousness.

Recorded live, mid-fair, with sweat, exhaustion, legal theory, and humor all equally present, the episode offers a rare look at how art, law, labor, and belief intersect... Just don't look to hard at it.

NAMES DROPPED

• Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach
• NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami
• Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com
• Ethereum blockchain — https://ethereum.org
• Mitchell Chan — https://mitchellchan.com
• Rick Astley (via Rickrolling NFTs) — https://www.rickastley.co.uk
• Lawrence Weiner — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lawrence-weiner-2124
• U.S. Copyright Office — https://www.copyright.gov
• Supreme Court of the United States — https://www.supremecourt.gov
• Morrison & Foerster
• Alfred Steiner - https://alfredsteiner.com/

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 a work that reverses the usual logic of media spectacle, shifting attention away from screens and systems and back toward the faces of people themselves.

From there, the conversation opens into a wide-ranging discussion of digital memory, data after death, and the uneasy permanence of media archives. Barcia-Colombo reflects on early works like Animalia, Chordata, his long-running interest in collecting and containing human presence, and later projects such as The Hereafter Institute, which staged personalized funerals for participants' digital lives. Throughout, the group wrestles with the problem of preservation in media art, from CRT monitors and film projectors to contemporary AI tools that threaten to erase labor, context, and material specificity.

The episode also touches on Barcia-Colombo's collaboration with David Byrne, his role as co-director of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the contradictions of teaching technology as a humanist practice inside systems driven by speed, spectacle, and capitalization. What emerges is a thoughtful meditation on how artists can still create moments of connection and care inside infrastructures not designed for either.

Recorded live, mid-storm, with rain hitting the merch cart and conversation drifting easily between theory, jokes, and deeply personal reflection.

Highlights & Moments

• Turning public architecture into a living portrait of the city
• LED "blades" as broken, moving images rather than seamless spectacle
• Directing strangers to perform the everyday and the sublime
• Data, memory, and what happens to our digital lives after death
• Early video art as prophecy rather than nostalgia
• The problem of preserving media art as technologies disappear
• Labor, erasure, and value in digital and AI-assisted work
• Teaching technology as a humanist practice at NYU ITP
• Collaborating with David Byrne under extreme time constraints
• AI as mirror, therapist, and deeply unsettling collaborator

Names Dropped

• Stony Island Arts Bank — https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/
• Chicago Architecture Biennial — https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
• Media Stream - https://150mediastream.com/
• Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - https://www.gabebc.com/
• Times Square public art installations
• Animalia, Chordata
• The Hereafter Institute
• Nam June Paik — https://www.paikstudios.com
• Bruce Nauman — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1478
• Paul Pfeiffer — https://www.moma.org/artists/4595
• Christian Marclay — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay-732
• NYU Tisch School of the Arts — https://tisch.nyu.edu
• Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — https://itp.nyu.edu
• Neon Museum, Las Vegas — https://www.neonmuseum.org

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 to keep showing up to a system that is both exhausting and irresistible.

The episode also dives into Gitler&____'s public-facing projects, including the long-running Audubon Mural Project, and the blurred line between consultancy, gallery work, and artist support. It is a conversation about taste, access, labor, exhaustion, and the odd hope that keeps people flying back to Miami year after year.

Recorded live, with roosters, bridges, hammocks, and just enough art world self-awareness to stay funny.

Highlights & Moments

• Ranking Miami fairs while openly admitting bias
• Why NADA still feels like a New York fair dropped into Miami
• Hammocks as both seating and market distortion
• Untitled as the gateway fair for first-time collectors
• The Beeple robot dog spectacle and the freedom of not knowing how to feel about it
• Counting banana references across satellite fairs
• "No motive" painting and the desire for unmediated experience
• Art advising as a creative practice rather than pure transaction
• The psychic toll of booth sitting and forced enthusiasm
• Why pre-selling booths feels like theater everyone agrees to perform

Names Dropped:

· Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach

· NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami

· Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com/

· Scope Art Show — https://scope-artshow.com/

· Audubon Mural Project — https://www.audubon.org/muralproject

· National Audubon Society — https://www.audubon.org/

· Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) coverage — https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/beeple-pooping-robot-dogs-at-art-basel-miami-beach-1234765375/

· Robert Moskowitz- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moskowitz

· Andrew Spence- https://andrewspenceart.com

· Western Exhibitions- https://westernexhibitions.com

· Submissions- https://www.submissions.art

· Canada Gallery- https://canadagallery.com

· Mac's Club- https://www.macsclubdeuce.com

· Gitler&____- https://www.gitlerand.com/

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 misrecognition.

The conversation pivots into economics and geography. Drawing on her business school training, Hilde walks through quantitative tightening, interest rates, the collapse of NFTs and crypto, and the bursting of the 2022 speculative bubble. She frames art explicitly as a Veblen good — a luxury asset that fails first when the economy tightens. She argues forcefully that New York is no longer an artist city, but a financialized transaction hub. Instead, she advocates for artists to relocate to affordable cities like Chicago or even small towns, building localized collector bases rather than chasing validation from elite centers.

What emerges is a sharp, pragmatic model of survival: cultivate 12 lifelong collectors, embrace regional ecosystems, make work for people you actually live with, and stop imagining museum permanence as the only measure of success. Hilde rejects the mythology of infinite institutional validation, arguing instead for circulation, use, disposal, and lived attachment. The episode closes on the tension between speculation and sustainability, between global markets and local communities, and between career branding and genuine artistic life.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

New Art Dealers Alliancehttps://www.newartdealers.org/

John Waters https://www.johnwaters.com/

Peaches (musician/performer) https://peachesmusic.net/

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) https://www.beeple-crap.com/

Maurizio Cattelan https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/maurizio-cattelan

Brice Marden https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/brice-marden-1577

Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/

Pace Gallery https://www.pacegallery.com/

Roxy Theatre, San Francisco (The Roxie) https://roxie.com/

Soho House https://www.sohohouse.com/

Ice Palace Studios, Miami (Art Fair Venue) https://www.icepalacestudios.com/

New York MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) https://new.mta.info/

Federal Reserve (The Fed) https://www.federalreserve.gov/

Whitney Museum of American Art https://whitney.org/

Chicago, IL https://www.choosechicago.com/

New York City, NY https://www.nyc.gov/

Dahlonega, Georgia https://www.dahlonega.org/

Miami Beach, FL https://www.miamibeachfl.gov/

Basel, Switzerland https://www.basel.com/en

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 staff. For Hilde, the memes were "fast food," while the deeper writing and podcasting they spawned became the real work.

The episode also dives into Hilde's hatred of artspeak, her love of Pixar movies as real art, and the gulf between what artists claim their work does in press releases and what's actually visible in the work. She riffs on turning incomprehensible exhibition texts into literal film scripts, skewers academic pretense, and praises the raw "holy" feeling of walking into a gallery without any language or theory at all.

In the second half of the conversation, Hilde talks about going to business school at NYU Stern after years inside galleries and the market. Learning macro- and microeconomics, statistics, and reading things like Enron's 10-K filings gave her a new lens on the art world as a distorted, unsustainable luxury market in a broader service-and-finance-based U.S. economy. From there, she and the hosts push into the hard questions: oversupply and under-demand for art, MFA pipelines, self-censorship, the moral theater of "perfect" artists, and why she believes most art schools should probably be consolidated or shut down.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

Jerry Saltz https://www.vulture.com/author/jerry-saltz/

Larry Gagosian https://gagosian.com/

Arne Glimcher https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/arne-glimcher/

Ben Davis https://news.artnet.com/author/ben-davis

Kenny Schachter https://www.artnet.com/artists/kenny-schachter/

Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/

Barbara Kingsley https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-kingsley-5b6b2411/

Delvin Duarte https://www.instagram.com/delvinduarte/

Keith Boadwee https://www.keithboadwee.com/

NADA Miami https://www.newartdealersalliance.org/

Art Basel Miami Beach https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach

Pace Gallery https://www.pacegallery.com/

Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) https://www.moca.org/

NYU Stern School of Business https://www.stern.nyu.edu/

San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) https://sfai.edu/

SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) https://www.sec.gov/

Enron (corporate reference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Vancouver Art Gallery https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/

Pixar https://www.pixar.com/

Up (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/

Inside Out (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/

Soul (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2948372/

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/

John Wick https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2911666/

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 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/

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-performance, part-publishing experiment — one that temporarily gives a community something most cities no longer have: a local critic writing about local work. From describing her process of writing in public (fully clothed), to fielding questions about dead artists, visibility, taste, and how critics navigate their own spreadsheets, Waxman opens up her practice with humor and clarity.

The episode also includes reflections on Chicago's art ecology, journalism's collapse, how artists use reviews, and what it means to keep going when the platforms keep disappearing.

Lori Waxman 🔗 https://loriwaxman.com/

Duncan MacKenzie 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/duncan/

Brian Andrews 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/brian/

Ryan Peter Miller 🔗 https://ryanpetermiller.com/

Jesse Malmed 🔗 https://jessemalmed.net/

Dan Attoe (artist) 🔗 https://www.danattoe.com/

Jerry Gogosian (Instagram art-world persona) 🔗 https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

Tali Halperin (artist/curator; Chicago-based) 🔗 https://tlihlprn.com/ (closest authoritative source)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) 🔗 https://mcachicago.org/

Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 🔗 https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

Masthead Brewing / Mast Brewing 🔗 https://mastheadbrewingco.com/

Chicago Tribune — Arts 🔗 https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/visual-arts/

Hyperallergic 🔗 https://hyperallergic.com/

Other People's Pixels (artist website hosting) 🔗 https://www.otherpeoplespixels.com/

Documenta 🔗 https://documenta.de/en

WLPN-LP 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio 🔗 https://lumpenradio.com/

Bad at Sports 🔗 https://badatsports.com/

The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic 🔗 https://60wrdmin.org/

Mavis Beacon (reference to "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing") 🔗 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Beacon

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 importance of failure and patience, and the way drawing becomes a long-term conversation with materials. He speaks candidly about the Chicago art ecosystem, the emotional dimensions of his practice, and the shifting sense of scale and intimacy in his recent work — including his Louis Bag series and large graphite constructions.

The episode captures an artist thinking in real time about endurance, attention, vulnerability, and artistic friendship.

· Drawing as a full-body practice: constraint, tension, rubber bands, architecture of line.

· Language + shorthand: transcription, coded systems, linguistic compression.

· Chicago as a site of artistic maturation: community, humility, seriousness.

· Material intelligence: graphite as dust, weight, pressure, residue.

· Patience and endurance: long timelines for developing works.

· Professional evolution: moving from iconic early works to quieter, more intimate forms.

· Artistic friendship and trust: collaboration, studio visits, long-running dialogues.

· Shorthand Drawings / Gregg Shorthand–based works

· Rubber band constructions & torn-grid drawings

· Graphite floor drawings / powder dispersion works

· Louis Bag series

· Wall-based large graphite sheets under tension

NAMES DROP-ed

· Tony Lewis - https://massimodecarlo.com/artists/tony-lewis

· Kevin Beasley (referenced indirectly in relation to material practice) - https://caseykaplangallery.com/artists/beasley/

· Nate Young - https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/36-nate-young/works/

· Theaster Gates - https://www.theastergates.com/

· Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/

· Kerry James Marshall - https://jackshainman.com/artists/kerry_james_marshall

· William Pope.L - https://www.miandn.com/artists/pope-l

· Rodney McMillian - https://vielmetter.com/artists/rodney-mcmillian/

· Amanda Williams - https://awstudioart.com/home.html

· Rashid Johnson - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2830-rashid-johnson/

· Charles Gaines - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/21845-charles-gaines/

· Torkwase Dyson - https://www.torkwasedyson.com/

· Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) - https://mcachicago.org/

· Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

· Shane Campbell Gallery - https://www.shanecampbellgallery.com/

· School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) - https://www.saic.edu/

Image Sarah Hudson

This week, Bad at Sports hits the road and heads north to Sheboygan and Kohler, Wisconsin — where art, industry, and community collide. We drop into the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency program to see how a small Midwestern town sustains one of the most ambitious intersections of art and manufacturing in the country. Michelle Grabner and Jodi Throckmorton.

From toilets to terracotta, brass casting to bathroom design, Kohler has been quietly incubating radical artistic practice for decades, embedding artists in its factories while JMKAC builds a civic platform for art environments, vernacular traditions, and contemporary experimentation. We talk with artists, administrators, and community members about what makes this ecosystem work — and why Sheboygan might just be the weirdest, most wonderful art town in America.

John Michael Kohler Arts Center @jmkacKohler Arts/Industry Residency Kohler Co. @kohler

Name-Drop

• Jodi Throckmorton - https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/7932-jodi-throckmorton

• Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/

• John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) — https://www.jmkac.org/

• Kohler Arts/Industry Residency — https://www.jmkac.org/arts-industry/

• Kohler Co. — https://www.kohlercompany.com/

• Art Preserve (JMKAC's satellite museum) — https://www.jmkac.org/art-preserve/

• Arts/Industry Alumni (sampled in conversation):

• Beth Lipman — https://www.bethlipman.com/ | @beth_lipman

• Ann Agee — https://www.annageestudio.com/

• Jeffrey Clancy — https://jeffreyclancy.com/home.html

• Ashwini Bhat — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/ashwini-bhat-reverberating-self/

• Pao Houa — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/pao-houa-her-the-imaginative-landscape/

• Lily Cox-Richard — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/water-sprouts-and-remains-an-unfolding/

• Sheboygan community — https://www.townofsheboyganwi.gov/