Bad At Sports

Ding ding ding! Time for Indoor Recess! This week the team does a deep dive to 2009 and our interview with seminal Chicago art group Temporary Services and celebrates all the good news in the art world today. CAC Ren OxBow

Indoor recess cannot be stopped! This week we throwback to our interview with Brendan Fernandes and honor Canada's musical heritage.

The Bad at Sports crew keep their social distance in the forth (and a half) week of Indoor Recess, our series of retro interviews featured in our upcoming Augmented Reality project. Relax and rewind to our conversation with Edra Soto.  

This week Bad at Sports is appearing as Indoor Recess. Collectively, we revisit the brilliance of Amanda Williams as we march towards the release of our augmented reality app (Bad at Reality) and the launch of Artists Run Chicago 2.0 at the Hyde Park Art Center probably August/September 2020.

This week we are joined by the Journal of Artist Books, Brad Freeman, and the Center for Book and Paper, then the Center for Book, Paper, and Print's, Mel Potter. We talk about the closure of these two historic artworld fixtures, the impact on the landscape of Chicago, hole it leaves nationally, And the choice by Columbia College Chicago to close the center and fold it into the department of Art and Art History.

Indoor recess persists this week as the Bad at Sports crew talk podcast walks, colorful garbage, toilet paper paintings, and Thomas Kinkade. All in the service of presenting a throwback episode with living legend Jessica Stockholder.

This week we check in from CAA 2020 in Chicago and is always at this conference we are discussing the MFA and what it does for you and me and all of us. To help us understand the recent evolution of these degrees we are joined by Ellen Mueller of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MK Guth of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Lisa Iglesias of the University of Florida Gainesville, and Paul Catanese of Columbia College Chicago (yes, that is where Duncan works also.)

Pandemic sends the Bad at Sports team home for Indoor Recess! For the next eight weeks we will be revisiting throwback classic Bad at Sports episodes that are featured in our upcoming augmented reality app. First up this week: Jim Duignan.

If you love artist run spaces and Chicago this is the B@SC episode for you! Today we are joined in the studio by Hyde Park Art Center’s Director of Exhibitions, Allison Peters Quinn, to discuss Artists Run Chicago 2.0, opening to the public on April 5th. Allison reflects on the previous iteration of Artist Run Chicago in 2009 and gives us some insight into 2.0, which features 50 artists run spaces and projects with concurrent programming throughout the summer. Stay tuned until the end of the show when we touch on our recent chili competition nerve and Allison compels us to reveal our latest Bad at Sports project.  *Sorry for the delay we were adapting to a changed world. We are going to try and drop thing a little more to schedule on Mondays and Thursdays through this "distancing event."

The entire Bad at Sports Center trifecta of Dana, Brian and Ryan are back in the studio today with Aaron Rodgers from Homeroom, Randall West from Chicago Composers Orchestra and visual artist Azadeh Gholizadeh to discuss Ten x Ten 2020, a collaborative series pairing 10 visual artists with 10 contemporary composers to create an album and print portfolio with the support of Spudnik Press. West and Gholizadeh discuss their particular process and play us excerpts from West’s composition for the project. Ten x Ten is ongoing throughout the rest of 2020 with concerts and exhibitions at various venues throughout Chicago.    

You can learn more about upcoming programming at http://www.tenxtenchicago.com/ or http://homeroomchicago.org/. 

Live from NADA New York... maybe more than a year ago but certainly last time we were at NADA NYC… NATO THOMPSON returns to the show to talk about “seeing power” and how we need to think about our relationship with culture, and culture’s relationship with us, especially when we are talking about "high art," "museums," and the tools of hegemony. What’s an artist to do?   https://www.natothompson.com/ https://www.newartdealers.org/ http://www.claireashley.com/ https://www.natothompson.com/books-2#/https/wwwmhpbookscom/books/seeing-powe/

This week Brian and Duncan take a trip to the College Art Association conference 2020 and catch up with Natasha Egan from the Museum of Contemporary Photography. This wide-ranging conversation starts with surveillance and their current exhibition “In Real Life” featuring the artists Stephanie Dinkins, Trevor Paglen, Leo Selvaggio, Maija Tammi, José Orlando Villatoro, Xu Bing, and Liam Young and ends with what is the nature of photography in our contemporary world.   https://www.mocp.org/index.php   https://www.collegeart.org/

Philip von Zweck speaks with Seth Brodsky about Gray Sounds, a new experimental sound and music series at the University of Chicago's Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.  On the occasion of the inaugural Gray Sound event Seth, Philip and Zachary Cahill talk with composer Peter Ablinger about “experimental” music, his work, noise, phonorealism, making a piano speak, and a host of other topics.  Peter Ablinger is an Austrian composer living in Berlin. He was recently in Chicago for a series of performances, lectures and an installation as part of Grey Sounds a new series produced by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago.   Seth Brodsky is the Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious" (California, 2017), and has published on such topics as opera, influence, and the music of John Cage and Benjamin Britten. He is current

Join Dana and Brian for a conversation with Alex Chitty, Raven Munsell and Jack Schneider, the artist and curators behind the playful and innovative exhibition Becoming the Breeze: Alex Chitty with Alexander Calder on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art through April 12th. We learn about the history of the Ruth and Leonard Horwich Family Loan that mandates the nearly permanent exhibition of Calder’s work and the ‘breeze’ of unseen documentation and labor that supports the beloved mobiles and sculptures.   More information on Becoming the Breeze https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2019/Becoming-The-Breeze. 

Join us today on Bad at Sports for a special interview with artist Ashley Teamer. Teamer discusses her latest exhibition, Better Than Me, and her work documenting the female basketball team at Dillard University. We delve into Teamer’s aspirations and  motivations fueling her work, which includes a new series of billboards featuring Dillard players that will be on view in New Orleans’ downtown during the 2020 NCAA Women's Final Four in April.    For more information https://ashleyteamer.com/ and http://www.whateditions.com/. 

The Terrain Biennial 2019. Radio Calamity... So this was expected to be a much longer episode. Then many things no one could control happened... Principally, it is now an interview with the Chicago based artist Ross Sawyers (who works as the Chair of Photography were Duncan works as the Chair of Art and Art History, Columbia College Chicago) with a couple of short footnotes. We are joined by his son Charlie. https://rossawyers.xhbtr.com/ https://terrainexhibitions.org/ What audio survived owes a debit to Tom Burtonwood, Monica Chadha, Holly Holmes, and Richard Medina. Apologies to Sarah Beth Woods, Lise McKean, and Bhagya Ajaikumar, and everyone scheduled with but not conversed with.

Erik Beehn and Amanda Browder throw down about the Vegas contemporary art world, printmaking, and the magic of the degraded form. https://www.testsiteprojects.com/ https://www.erikbeehn.com/ https://www.amandabrowder.com/

This episode of Bad at Sports Center finds our hosts, Dana and Ryan are over-caffeinated and in the studio with artist Maryam Taghavi. We practice Farsi live on air while we learn about Taghavi’s flag project, بیست و چهار هفت  or Twenty Four/ Seven, currently on view as part of Roman Susan’s Woman’s Club at The Cuckoo’s Theater, which is on display in Roger's Park through Nowruz (the Iranian New Year) on March 18th. We discuss the artist's upcoming projects, flat experiences of time, and Taghavi takes us on her fascinating journey to Iran to recreate a 1984 photo. More information about Woman’s Club can be found at https://romansusan.org/w-club. You can learn more about Maryam’s work at https://www.maryamtaghavi.com/.     

On this episode of Bad at Sports Center, Dana and Brian are joined in the studio by Josh Zoerner and Chris Eichenseer of Public Works to discuss You Will Die, a frightening premonition which also happens to be the title of the gallery’s latest exhibition. Zoerner and  Eichenseer take us into the surprisingly delightful world of visual artists working in the realm of death metal music. During the second half of the show our hosts learn more about the history of Public Works, and their resilient space in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. You Will Die runs through February 14th, with a closing reception and event called Venus Doom: Dark Valentine's Day Party from 7-11pm with  DJ sets by Fee Lion and performance by GirlBoifriend. More information can be found at publicworksgallery.com.   

Today on Bad at Sports Center, Dana is joined in the studio by guest host Noel Morical for an interview with curator, Anastasia Tinari, and artists Selva Aparicio and Valentina Zamfirescu whose exhibition, Beyond Reach, is currently on view at Roots and Culture through February 22nd. Aparicio and Zamfirescu reveal the intimate and fascinating infrastructure behind the show, which deals with impressions of death and loss through site specific installation. VR, cicadas, cadavers and much, much more on this episode of BASC.  Special thanks to Lumpen's Jamie Trecker for supporting this episode! More information on Beyond Reach can be found at https://www.rootsandculturecac.org/show/selva-aparicio-and-valentina-zamfirescu/.