Should we be more depressed about accelerating climate change or optimistic for human potential in a time of crisis? This week Jesse and Brian talk through the surprising artworks featured in Earthly Observatory with curators Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang.

Today on Bad at Sportscenter, Jesse and Ryan are joined by some of the stars that form the constellation that post-latin-loqui astroscholars are calling This Is What We Know So Far, an exhibition open now at Chicago Art Department: artists Liz McCarthy, Sara Condo, Leo Kaplan and curator Erin Nixon. Along with Chicago faves Mike Lopez and Ben Driggs, they've mounted a colorful and joutous show dealing with process, the new now and the messiness of the moment. The conversation is lovely and the show even lovelier.

This week we check in on Tiger Strikes Asteroid with curators Teresa Silva and Holly Cahill. we examine collective art action, the network, Mana contemporary art space, and the half 46 person group show "It Feels Like The First Time."

https://www.artsy.net/show/mana-contemporary-tiger-strikes-asteroid-it-feels-like-the-first-time?sort=partner_show_position https://www.tigerstrikesasteroid.com/

This week we continue our summer of comic investigation with

Seitu Hayden. Chicago illustrator extraordinaire and long time indie comic supporter. We talk about his 50 years in the independent publishing spaces, black comics, and some of the bright lights that made the scene happen. Hayden's works were included in the MCA's Chicago Comics:1960 to Now and the book "It's Life as I See it: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980."

http://www.saytoons.com/ #saytoons https://www.lambiek.net/artists/h/hayden_seitu.htm

…meanwhile, in the least mysterious city on the planet (apparently Chicago), Duncan and Ryan panel with the overmodest Artist/Cartoonist Chris Ware and Chicago's cultural historian emeritus Tim Samuelson about the storied origins of the Chicago comic scene. In this harrowing episode our protagonists discuss a triumvirate of collaborative projects: the Chicago Cultural Center's, "Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life 1880-1960", the forthcoming exhibit at Wrightwood 659 "Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sulliv

an and Wright", and an eponymous interminable exhibition of Samuelson's personal historical ephemera curated by Ware at the Chicago Cultural Center.

This week we are joined by the great cartoonist and brilliant artist Jessica Campbell. Campbell's cartoons and relief sculptures are on view at Chicago's MCA as part of Comics in Chicago: 1960s to Now. She also has an upcoming exhibition at Western Exhibitions Gallery in Chicago and a graphic novel about to drop from Drawn & Quarterly, "Rave."

This week Bad @ Sports Center is winnowed down to skeleton crew, with Ryan Peter Miller chewing the fat with the ever vital Diana Guerrero-Maciá. Fresh from receiving a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, Guerrero-Maciá discusses her studio practice which includes slow-craft processes in painting, textiles, drawing, print, and sculptural objects. With new work recently completed for two exhibitions, High Touch, at John Michael Kohler Art Center and Light Falls Fast at Traywick Contemporary, this is a hearty conversation.

This week Bad at Sports attempts to get to the bottom of whether foundation.app is a marketplace, a platform, or a cultural hall. Dana Bassett and Duncan MacKenzie are joined by Kayvon Tehranian, CEO and Lindsay Howard, Head of Community who are lighting our way towards how artists can get paid for their content while creating a new way to sell and consume art works, and just maybe, building a new internet in the meantime.

Duncan is trying to convince Lindsay to start a book club. If you're interested slide something into his DMs.

In what feels like a throwback episode Ryan and Duncan record IRL with Holly Holmes and Tom Burtonwood. We explore the legacy of Sabina Ott, the future for the Terrain Biennial and its 2021 iteration, then we talk through what is going on in their studios and focus around their exploration of the NFT artwork space.

https://terrainexhibitions.org/

https://tomburtonwood.com/home.html

https://hollyholmes.xyz/home.html

This week on the B@S, Stella Brown and Nick Wylie join Jesse and Brian to talk about Buddy — the new artist-run shop/gallery/venue at the Chicago Cultural Center that features works and products by more than 220 artists — and Co-Prosperity Catskill — the new exhibition space in the Hudson Valley. These two new projects from the Public Media Institute, whose many many include WLPN, Lumpen Magazine, Lumpen TV and the Co-Prosperity space in Bridgeport, extend the ever-shifting and growing publicnesses that amplify, support and nurture so many artists and thinkers in our city. We talk about the realms of the possible, the concept of the public and end up making an ad (-vertisement and -vocacy) for Chicago in many acts.