Bad at Sports

Art Papers, Fire Ecology, and Ending Well
This week on Bad at Sports, we sit down in Atlanta with Sarah Higgins, Executive and Artistic Director of Art Papers, during the Art Papers symposium.
What unfolds is a candid, generous, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about what it means to end something well. As Art Papers approaches its final chapter after nearly 50 years, Higgins lays out a model for institutional closure that resists panic, rejects compromise, and instead asks: what if ending is a form of contribution?
From the "fire ecology" framework to radical transparency about budgets, labor, and sustainability, this conversation moves from grief to strategy to something like collective possibility.
Along the way: the death of art criticism models, nonprofit fatigue, Chicago parallels, and why maybe nobody is coming to save us.

Names Dropped (Bad at Sports style)
Sarah Higgins — https://www.artpapers.org Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Art Papers Symposium — https://www.artpapers.org New Art Examiner — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Art_Examiner Dan Talley — https://www.artpapers.org Laura Lieberman — https://www.artpapers.org Real Art Ways — https://realartways.org Critical Minded — https://criticalminded.org Ponce City Market — https://www.poncecitymarket.com Jamestown — https://www.jamestownlp.com National Endowment for the Arts — https://www.arts.gov Mary Louise Schumacher — https://www.marylouiseschumacher.com Lucy – https://www.thenewatlantis.com/futurisms/the-muddled-message-of-lucy Scarlett Johansson – https://scarlett-johansson.net/ Morgan Freeman – https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/f/fo-fz/morgan-freeman/

Recorded live at the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, this episode features a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation with Tori Tinsley. Joined by Brian Andrews and Duncan MacKenzie, Tinsley reflects on caregiving, grief, motherhood, and the evolution of her "hug" figures across painting, sculpture, and animation.
Her practice emerges from lived experience, particularly her mother's diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia, and expands into a broader inquiry into emotional labor, embodiment, and the absurdity of contemporary life. Humor, instability, and tenderness coexist in work that resists resolution while remaining deeply accessible.

Name Drop List (with links)
Tori Tinsley — https://www.google.com/search?q=Tori+Tinsley+artist
Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/
Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org/
School of the Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.saic.edu/
Georgia State University (GSU) — https://artdesign.gsu.edu/
William Kentridge — https://www.kentridge.studio/
Brené Brown — https://brenebrown.com/

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Abigail Satinsky sit down with Nato Thompson for a conversation that spans collapsing institutions, alternative economies, and what it actually means to sustain a life in art.
Recorded in the context of an art fair ecosystem that increasingly blurs community, commerce, and survival, Thompson reflects on his path from Creative Time to Philadelphia Contemporary (RIP unrealized museum), and into his current multi-pronged practice: consulting, artist support, and the evolving Alternative Art School.
What starts as a casual catch-up quickly becomes something sharper: a diagnosis of failing art school models, a critique of nonprofit dependency, and a proposal for artist-centered infrastructures that actually function.
Along the way: dark matter artists, subscription economies, global classrooms, refrigerator exhibitions, and the radical idea that maybe art isn't a career ladder at all.
Names Dropped (with links)
Nato Thompson — https://natothompson.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Abigail Satinsky — https://www.abigailsatinsky.com/
Creative Time — https://creativetime.org/ Philadelphia Contemporary — https://philadelphiacontemporary.org/ Alternative Art School — https://alternativeartschool.net/
e-flux — https://www.e-flux.com/ Anton Vidokle — https://www.e-flux.com/about/anton-vidokle/
Powerhouse Arts — https://powerhousearts.org/
Raqs Media Collective — https://raqsmediacollective.net/ Tania Bruguera — https://www.taniabruguera.com/ Guadalupe Maravilla — https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com/ Jeremy Deller — https://www.jeremydeller.org/ Lexa Walsh — https://www.lexawalsh.com/
Times Square Arts — https://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts

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 — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Ryan (Peter Miller) — http://ryanpetermiller.com/
Damon Locks — https://damonlocks.black/
Goldfinch Gallery — https://goldfinch-gallery.com/ Lumpen Radio — https://lumpenradio.com/
Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — https://pnaep.org/ Stateville Correctional Center — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateville_Correctional_Center
Artists / Art References
Charles White — https://www.artic.edu/artists/23067/charles-white Raymond Pettibon — https://gagosian.com/artists/raymond-pettibon/ Emory Douglas — https://www.moma.org/artists/13246 Kerry James Marshall — https://kerryjamesmarshall.com/
Music / Punk References
Bad Brains — https://www.badbrains.com/ Minor Threat — https://dischord.com/band/minor-threat Government Issue — https://dischord.com/band/government-issue The Clash — https://www.theclash.com/ Siouxsie and the Banshees — https://www.siouxsieandthebanshees.co.uk/ The Damned — https://www.officialdamned.com/ Big Black — https://touchandgorecords.com/bands/big-black/ Naked Raygun — https://www.nakedraygun.org/ Black Flag — https://sstsuperstore.com/collections/black-flag
Comics / Illustration Influences
John Byrne — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/b/byrne_john.htm Neal Adams — https://nealadams.com/ George Pérez — https://www.marvel.com/comics/creators/126/george_perez Marshall Rogers — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/r/rogers_marshall.htm

Guests: Annette LePique, Curtis Anthony Bozif, Pia Singh, Gareth Kaye
Recorded with the support of Columbia College Chicago - Colum.edu
What happens when you gather a room full of critics in a moment when criticism itself feels both endangered and newly alive?
In this long-awaited return to the Chicago Critics Roundtable, Duncan sits down with a new multi-hyphenate crew of writers, curators, artists, and exhibition-makers to unpack the shifting role of criticism in a fractured "art ecology." What emerges is a conversation about care, attention, subjectivity, labor, and the strange intimacy of thinking deeply about someone else's work.
From the death of legacy media to the rise of Substack, from writing as love to writing as agitation, this episode positions criticism as a lived, embodied, and often obsessive practice.
Criticism is relational, literary, emotional, and deeply entangled with the conditions of making and showing art in Chicago today, and certainly never "neutral". 
Name Drop List (with links)
Duncan MacKenzie—https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Brian Andrews—https://www.brianandrews.org/
Annette LePique—https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/byline/annette-lepique/
Curtis Anthony Bozif—https://www.curtisanthonybozif.com/
Pia Singh—https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/22319-pia-singh
Gareth Kaye—https://chicagospleen.substack.com/
Derrick Guthrie—https://derrickguthrie.com/
Lane Relyea—https://www.artic.edu/authors/71/lane-relyea
James Elkins—https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/james-elkins
Michelle Grabner—https://www.michellegrabner.com/
Lori Waxman—https://www.60inchcenter.org/lori-waxman
Charles Baudelaire—https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-baudelaire
Dave Hickey—https://www.artforum.com/contributors/dave-hickey
Werner Herzog—https://www.bfi.org.uk/filmography/werner-herzog
Timothy Morton—https://www.timothymorton.net/
Rachel Carson—https://www.rachelcarson.org/
Peter Schjeldahl—https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-schjeldahl