Bad at Sports – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Technical and general information from the podcast's RSS feed.

Bad at Sports

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/8d. Total Eps: 982

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.

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.

See all

https://www.expochicago.com/
47 shares
https://www.newartdealers.org/
47 shares
https://kurasmackenzie.com/
28 shares

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
4 shares
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCarthy
4 shares
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
3 shares

https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian
6 shares
https://www.instagram.com/
3 shares
https://www.instagram.com/mariela.acuna
2 shares

RSS feed quality and score

Technical evaluation of the podcast's RSS feed quality and structure.

See all

RSS feed quality

To improve

Score global : 38%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

Recent episodes with titles, durations, and descriptions.

See all

Bad at Sports Episode 978: Delano Dunn

Season 1 · Episode 978

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 • Duration 59:39

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews visit the studio of artist Delano Dunn, whose dazzling collages combine the visual excess of the 1980s and '90s with the deeply uncomfortable histories embedded in American popular culture.

Dunn's work is seductive by design. Glitter, holographic surfaces, bright colors, vintage advertisements, and fragments of historical imagery draw viewers into compositions that quickly reveal something considerably darker. Racist caricatures, political figures, and the visual machinery of American consumer culture collide in works that ask us to confront histories we might prefer to forget.

The conversation begins with collage and moves into an expansive discussion of race, memory, representation, and the complicated business of making images. Dunn takes aim at contemporary portraiture, arguing that too many portraits strip their subjects of contradiction, complexity, and humanity. His alternative? Find the dirt. Historical figures are more interesting when we acknowledge the things that make them difficult, compromised, and recognizably human.

Along the way, the conversation wanders through Steely Dan, Larry Rivers, Ronald Reagan, comic books, moviegoing, art history, hockey, the Chicago Bears, and the peculiar ways that sports culture might teach the art world something about developing an audience.

The discussion also takes us to Dunn's exhibition *Echoes in the Margin* at Troutbeck in Amenia, New York. Curated by Mickalene Thomas and presented with the Wassaic Project, the exhibition brings together works addressing American history and race, including portraits of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Ida B. Wells.

The location is particularly resonant: Troutbeck hosted important NAACP gatherings in 1916 and 1933. Dunn is interested not simply in celebrating historical figures but in recovering their contradictions, personalities, and humanity.

It's an episode about the pleasure of looking, the danger of forgetting, and why a little glitter can make some very difficult conversations possible.

Names Dropped:

Delano Dunn — https://www.delanodunn.com/

Duncan MacKenzie — https://badatsports.com/ (program website)

Brian Andrews — https://badatsports.com/ (program website; individual turns not audio-verified)

Arturo Herrera — https://smartcollection.uchicago.edu/objects/973/untitled

Michael Ray Charles — https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/interview-michael-ray-charles-24827

Larry Rivers — https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_66.4295

Napoleon Bonaparte — https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_66.4295 (relevant artwork)

Jacques-Louis David — https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_66.4295 (relevant artwork)

Ronald Reagan — https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/ronald-reagan/

W. E. B. Du Bois — https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html

Langston Hughes — https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes

Ida B. Wells — https://www.nps.gov/people/ida-b-wells.htm

Mickalene Thomas — https://www.wassaicproject.org/exhibitions/delano-dunn-echoes-in-the-margin

Eve Biddle — https://www.wassaicproject.org/ (organization only; exact role not independently verified)

Joel Spingarn — https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html

Clarence Thomas — https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx

Harlan Crow — https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-luxury-trips-harlan-crow-supreme-court

Joel Chandler Harris — https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/joel-chandler-harris-1848-1908/

Vincent Price — https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/7f444b7b-d778-5559-8222-15f9b485ac11/theatre-of-blood

Diana Rigg — https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/7f444b7b-d778-5559-8222-15f9b485ac11/theatre-of-blood

Shane Gillis — https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live (general program page, not verification of the specific monologue)

Echoes in the Margin — https://www.wassaicproject.org/exhibitions/delano-dunn-echoes-in-the-margin

Troutbeck — https://troutbeck.com/

Wassaic Project — https://www.wassaicproject.org/

Montague Contemporary — https://www.montaguecontemporary.com/exhibitions/63-echoes-in-the-margin-delano-dunn/overview/

School of the Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/delano-dunn

NAACP — https://naacp.org/

Amenia Conference (1916) — https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html

Second Amenia Conference (1933) — https://loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/the-great-depression.html

Art Review – https://artreview.com/

Vanity Fair — https://www.vanityfair.com/

Affordable Art Fair — https://affordableartfair.com/

Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.artic.edu/

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

Guggenheim Fellowships — https://www.gf.org/

WEB DuBois (Delano Dunn) — https://www.wassaicproject.org/exhibitions/delano-dunn-echoes-in-the-margin

The Greatest Homosexual, after "Napoleon in his Study" by David (Larry Rivers, 1964) — https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_66.4295

The Second Greatest Homosexual (Larry Rivers, 1965) — https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6161153

Uncle Remus stories — https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/joel-chandler-harris-1848-1908/

Steely Dan — https://steelydanofficial.com/

Absolute Batman — https://www.dc.com/

X-Men / Uncanny X-Men — https://www.marvel.com/comics

The Sandman — https://www.dc.com/

Commando — https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=Commando%201985

The Breakfast Club — https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=The%20Breakfast%20Club%201985

Menace II Society — https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=Menace%20II%20Society

Theatre of Blood (1973) — https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/7f444b7b-d778-5559-8222-15f9b485ac11/theatre-of-blood (corrects 1972)

Saturday Night Live — https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live

Chicago Bears — https://www.chicagobears.com/

Chicago Cubs — https://www.mlb.com/cubs

Chicago White Sox — https://www.mlb.com/whitesox

Chicago Blackhawks — https://www.nhl.com/blackhawks

Los Angeles riots — https://www.history.com/topics/1990s/los-angeles-riots

Read moreCollapse

Bad at Sports Episode 977: E. Saffronia Downing

Season 1 · Episode 977

Wednesday, October 21, 2026 • Duration 01:02:33

What can a handful of dirt tell you about where you live? At ACRE Projects in Chicago, the Bad at Sports crew joins ceramic artist E. Saffronia Downing amid her exhibition Pressed Flower to talk about wild clay, the material memory of cities, and what happens when people are invited to mail you their dirt.

For Call for Clay, Downing issued open invitations in 2023 and 2025 for participants to send foraged clay, along with letters about where it came from. Published by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the resulting book brings together 40 contributors from 19 states and three countries. Part correspondence project, part material archive, it is a portrait of the places we carry around with us—even when they arrive in a Ziploc bag.

The conversation moves from Chicago's common bricks and a stream beneath Downing's family home in Baltimore to a mysterious flower-or-gear pressed into an upstate New York sidewalk. There are hand-pinched beads that are also seeds, ceramic tiles embedded in gallery walls, the environmental ethics of taking dirt from the ground, and the industrial operations hidden behind the humble bag of studio clay. Add some kiln-shelf anxiety, colored-pencil drawing on fired ceramics, and an inconclusive effort to determine whether everything is sculpture, and you have a pretty good afternoon at Bad at Sports.

Names Dropped:

E. Saffronia Downing – https://e-saffronia.net/

Ryan Peter Miller – https://ryanpetermiller.com/about

Duncan MacKenzie – https://badatsports.com/broadcast-staff/duncan-mackenzie/

Brian Andrews – https://www.brianandrews.org/

Katherine (Kitty) Ross –

Bad at Sports Episode 976: Tony Lewis and Bosco Bae

Season 1 · Episode 976

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 • Duration 01:38:44

Duncan MacKenzie and Jesse Malmed sit down with artist Tony Lewis and Bosco Bae, brother of the late Chicago artist Gregory Bae (1986–2021), for a moving, funny, and candid conversation recorded live at PATRON Gallery in Chicago.

The occasion is Let's Go Exploring!, a two-person exhibition bringing together work by longtime friends and studio mates Tony Lewis and Gregory Bae. But what begins as a conversation about an exhibition quickly becomes something more complicated: an exploration of friendship, loss, memory, artistic responsibility, and the strange business of keeping an artist's work alive after their death.

Tony and Bosco recount the collective efforts to preserve Gregory's work, from moving the contents of his studio and organizing the artist-led archival project CV to making curatorial decisions that Gregory himself might not have agreed with. What should survive? What gets exhibited? Who has the authority to decide? And how can an archive remain experimental, generous, and alive rather than becoming a monument to a fixed history?

The group considers the ethics of recreating artworks, a bonsai that might be both alive and doomed, Tony's enormous graphite basketball-court drawing, the politics of Asian American identity, and the sometimes extraordinary generosity of Chicago's artistic community.

The exhibition's title comes from the final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Name Drops and links:

Tony Lewis – https://patrongallery.com/artist/tonylewis/cv
Bosco Bae - https://boscobae.com/
Gregory Bae – https://patrongallery.com/artist/gregorybae
Josh Dihle – https://www.joshdihle.com/
Robert Chase Heishman –

Bad at Sports Episode 975: Paul Nudd

Season 1 · Episode 975

Friday, October 9, 2026 • Duration 57:44

Brian Andrews, Duncan MacKenzie, and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Chicago-area artist Paul Nudd at Spudnik Press, surrounded by the work of the 1st International Milwaukee Riso Invitational.

Nudd has spent more than two decades producing a gloriously strange universe of hairy organisms, mutant bodies, psychedelic biological forms, and wonderfully unsettling surfaces. His work moves between painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and, most recently, ceramics. But beneath all the slime, crust, and occasional bodily horror is an artist deeply committed to experimentation, collaboration, and the pleasures of making things.

The conversation begins with Nudd's long relationship with Chicago's printmaking community, including his legendary 2009 residency at Spudnik Press with cartoonist Onsmith, where the pair produced more than a thousand prints—and apparently sold none of them.

Nudd describes why he loves Riso's imperfect surfaces, the magic of working with master printers, his affection for Chicago Imagism, and the importance of preserving uncertainty in the studio. The hosts also investigate whether Nudd's work is actually gross or not.

The second half finds Nudd reflecting on the unexpected pleasures of ceramics, his work as an elementary school art teacher, creative attention, and the increasingly porous boundaries between his studio, garden, kitchen, compost heap, and classroom.

Recorded at Spudnik Press, Chicago, in conjunction with the closing of the 1st International Milwaukee Riso Invitational.

Name drops and links

Paul Nudd - https://westernexhibitions.com/artist/paul-nudd/

Onsmith - https://www.spudnikpress.org/people/onsmith/

Chris Flynn - https://cflynnprints.com/

Jim Nutt -

Bad at Sports Episode 974: Mari Eastman

Season 1 · Episode 974

Friday, October 2, 2026 • Duration 01:00:28

What makes a painting worth saving? What happens when the image in your head refuses to become the image on your panel? And why does everybody want another fox?

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Ryan Peter Miller welcome Chicago painter Mari Eastman for a conversation recorded at Spudnik Press during its Riso Print Fest. Eastman takes us through the pleasures and frustrations of painting, from translating a beloved fox into a woodblock print to rescuing abandoned paintings with techniques borrowed from Bob Ross. They explore fashion photography, the Chicago figurative painting scene, the peculiar intimacy of appropriated images, and the elusive point where faithful representation can lose the feeling that made an image irresistible in the first place.

Name Drops:

Mari Eastman - bombonprojects.com
Ben Butler - benbutlerart.com
Shannon Stratton - shannonraestratton.com
Edvard Munch - nga.gov
Kerry James Marshall - nga.gov
Paul McCarthy - hauserwirth.com
Tyson Reeder - canadanewyork.com
Carl Baratta - carlbaratta.com
Bob Ross - bobross.com

Bad at Sports Episode 973: Manuel Mathieu

Season 1 · Episode 973

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 • Duration 01:06:47

What do you do when your hope for the future starts to feel fragile? And what can a painting, an act of remembrance, or a bottle of perfume do about it?

Duncan MacKenzie sits down with Haitian-born artist Manuel Mathieu at Calgary's Esker Foundation for a conversation that moves between studio practice and the world beyond it. They begin with Mathieu's presentation at the 2026 Venice Biennale, including GENOCIDE and his mosaic Abundance and Drought, then explore archives, erasure, political power, the responsibilities of artists, and whether art can make room for disagreement without closing down empathy.

Mathieu talks through the evolution of his paintings, from highly controlled marks to surfaces that scrape, drip, burn, and resist their original plans. He argues that figuration is not abstraction's opposite so much as one of its tools. He and Duncan work through the possibilities of beauty, Haitian Vodou, spirituality, the legacy of Toussaint Louverture, and the difference between changing the world and changing the lives of the people near you.

Name Drops and links

Manuel Mathieu - https://www.manuelmathieu.com/
Clyfford Still - https://clyffordstillmuseum.org/
Kara Walker - https://www.karawalkerstudio.com/
Kent Monkman - https://www.kentmonkman.com/
Titus Kaphar - https://www.kapharstudio.com/
Willem de Kooning - https://www.dekooning.org/
Christian Boltanski - https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/personne/z88xAxH

Bad at Sports Episode 972: Jeanette Andrews

Season 1 · Episode 972

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • Duration 01:06:47

Artist and magician Jeanette Andrews joins Duncan and Jesse at the Elmhurst Art Museum, the very place where, as a teenager, she began imagining how magic could become contemporary art. Nearly twenty years later, that ambition has become an exhibition.

The conversation travels from Victorian parlor magic and vaudeville to the psychology of surprise, Alan Turing, and Andrews's Taken by Artificial Surprise, which asks audiences to distinguish between human-created magic and illusions developed with machine learning. Along the way: why knowing how a trick works can ruin the experience, whether magic is really for adults, and a research process involving enough handwritten notes to make an apartment resemble a conspiracy theorist's headquarters.

****Update: The HCL Benefit is November 10th, 2026

Photo: Michael George

Name Drop List:

Duncan MacKenzie - kurasmackenzie.com

Jesse Malmed - uwm.edu/arts/directory/malmed-jesse/

Jeanette Andrews - jeanetteandrewsstudio.com

Bad at Sports - badatsports.com

Lumpen Radio - lumpenradio.com

Elmhurst Art Museum - elmhurstartmuseum.org

McCormick House - elmhurstartmuseum.org/architecture

Bad at Sports Episode 971: Jean Alexander Frater, Matthew Girson & Dana DeGiulio at Material

Season 1 · Episode 971

Friday, September 25, 2026 • Duration 58:45

What can eight small paintings tell us about the possibilities of an artist-run space? Duncan MacKenzie, joined midway by Jesse Malmed, speaks with Jean Alexander Frater, Matthew Girson, and Dana DeGiulio about a two-person exhibition at Material, Jean's artist-run project space in Chicago's Roscoe Village. Four paintings by Matthew and four by Dana are installed in an alternating sequence, setting up a conversation across the walls rather than dividing the gallery by artist.

Their discussion begins with the particular staying power of artist-run Chicago: Dana's work establishing Julius Caesar in 2008, Matthew's earlier project presenting artworks from the cab of a pickup truck, and Jean's decade of making room for other artists at Material. From there, the conversation turns to the peculiar ambitions of intimate paintings, each made within a day. Is choosing a familiar genre conservative? What happens when a painting leaves the studio and enters the social space of an exhibition? And what can an actual encounter with an object offer that a circulating image cannot?

The group follows those questions through care, constraint, repetition, touch, and hospitality—with Maggie Nelson, Agnes Martin, Nina Simone, and the art market making appearances along the way. If a painting cannot tell its viewer what to feel, perhaps it can begin a sentence someone else is free to finish.

Names Dropped:

Duncan MacKenzie - kurasmackenzie.com/

Jesse Malmed - jessemalmed.net/

Jean Alexander Frater - alexanderfrater.com/home.html

Matthew Girson - matthewgirson.com/

Bad at Sports Episode: 970 - A P(o)or(t)ch Theater with Mark Jeffery, Judd Morrissey and Kristin Mariani

Season 1 · Episode 970

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 • Duration 01:06:36

At Spudnik Press in Chicago, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews and Ryan Peter Miller welcome Mark Jeffery, Judd Morrissey and Kristin Mariani to discuss the Poor Farm Experiment's Leopold Benches: A P(o)or(t)ch Theater (MIDWEST REDUX).

Developed through the U.S. Pavilion's PORCH program at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and presented in Chicago at the MCA's Chicago Performs festival, the work turns a porch into a place of observation, invitation, performance and collective play.

The conversation moves through Aldo Leopold's benches, stereoscopic photographs and binocular rivalry, Mariani's language-bearing Text Toiles, the choreography of "queer sitting," and the Deeply Choir's role in animating the museum plaza.

It also opens onto the project's wider artistic ecology: Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's Poor Farm in Wisconsin; Mark Jeffery and Kelly Kaczynski's residency practice; the nido residency in Umbria; and an approach to collaboration in which living together, hosting, making and friendship become inseparable.

PERFORMANCE:

9/25/2026 - 3pm at the MCA! (Dolly Day)

Names Dropped:

Duncan MacKenzie - kurasmackenzie.com

Brian Andrews - brianandrews.org

Ryan Peter Miller - ryanpetermiller.com/about

Mark Jeffery - saic.edu/profiles/faculty/mark-jeffery

Judd Morrissey - saic.edu/profiles/faculty/judd-morrissey

Bad at Sports Episode 969: Abby Pucker and Chanelle Lacy... It's Cool to Care?

Season 1 · Episode 969

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 • Duration 01:16:46

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:

NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING Guests / Gertie Chicago Exhibition Week Gertie exhibitions discussed Earlier projects / people Chicago art ecosystem / venues Music / festival / cultural comparisons Membership-program references Other institutions / art-market references

Bad at Sports – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Bad at Sports – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Wikipedia99+

Instagram85

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Wikipedia99+

Instagram85