Bad At Sports

This week Duncan, thanks to Columbia College Chicago and a class called the Late Late Afternoon Show, rocks the mic with Amanda Williams whose work blew our collective minds with the "Color(ed) Theory" series of public works on the south side of Chicago. She pulled in the lion's share of the press at the 2015 Chicago Architectural Biennial and seems to have been going nonstop since!  

This week: Richard and Duncan talk to the curators and artists of Present Standard! Guest curated by Edra Soto and Josue Pellot, Present Standard features 25 contemporary artists with Latino Chicago connections. Their works that play with the manifold meanings and forms suggested by the “standard” – as either a flag or a pennant, a measuring tactic or a guiding principle, or a potent symbol of national identity.

Ebony G Patterson is tearing apart our collective American contemporary art consciousness. She has recently closed a show at New York's Museum of Arts and Design and is rocking as exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem! We caught up with her at EXPO Chicago. Richard and Duncan announce a new Bad at Sports initiative.   Names Dropped: Bling Funerals, Trinidad Carnival, Monique Meloche, Krista Thompson, Claire Tancons, ICI (Independent Curators International), Michael Brown, Jacquard Loom, Prospect, Carpal Tunnel, Jamaica Biennial, Chincy, Skin Bleaching, Metrosexual, Man Bun, Kanye West, Jay Z, Kehendi Wiley, man liner, Cindy Sherman, the New York Times, Stan Douglas, Frank Stella, Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Anthony Smith, Dan Gunn, Sabina Ott  

This week: NO NOT THE GUITAR COLLECTOR! Instead this week Duncan and Jesse talk to Deborah Stratman the artist and filmmaker.    

This week: Bad at Sports goes to SPRING BREAK Art Fair in the burned out section of the Post Office building on the Westside of Manhattan. Sadly we did not get loopy with jello shots and beach balls, but instead nerded out with some killer art conversations with some fantastic work! Joining Amanda this week is her co-host artist Caroline Burghardt, a Brooklyn based artists who looks at the relationship between humans and nature. Check out her site at www.carolineburghardt.com.    At the fair we first chatted with artist David B. Smith about his installation of fabric based sculptures. Then headed over to the curated exhibition "Doppelnamer" that is curated by and Elisabeth Smolarz,  Lauren Silberman and Jamie Diamond. We chatted with Elisabeth and Lauren about the artists in the show, and their doppelnamers. The artists featured in the room were: Daniel Bejar, Vince Contarino, Andrew Ross, Jonathan Allen, Brent Birnbaum, Jamie Diamond, Lauren Silberman and Elisabeth Smolarz... and all of their doppelnamers. 

Brian and Patricia play Mulder and Scully this week as they sit down with the masterminds behind the SETI Institute artists-in-residence program. For those B@S faithful listeners unfamiliar with the Institute (An oxymoron, if there ever was one ) SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Yes, friends, we're talking space aliens.   As part of the Institute's goal "to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations," they now host a residency program for artists based out of their Mountain View, CA headquarters. Artists work with scientists across a range of disciplines at any of the associated facilities to facilitate an exchange of ideas an create new modes of comprehension or expression. No, they didn't tell us how you can apply.    We hear from SETI AIR director Charles Lindsey, who was the inaugural AIR, and Advisory Committee chair Denise Markonish, who is curator at M

This week: Tom Sanford is back! Tom and Duncan talk to Avi Gitler about his gallery Gitler & _______ and his amazing stories of world travel and the terror of facing the NYT art critic!    

This week Dana Bassett and Duncan MacKenzie catch up with Peter Wachtler at Chicago's Renaissance Society just after their 100th anniversary. We "borrowed" this from Art Space which "borrowed" it from the Liverpool Biennial... probably it is updated on the Renassance Society website. PETER WÄCHTLER Born: 1979 Hometown: Hanover, Germany Lives and Works: Brussels, Belgium and Berlin, Germany Education: Fine Art Studies, Bauhaus-University Weimar with Prof. Fritz Rahmann, 2004 Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury / England   While it might seem foreign or unfamiliar, underwater life, bourgeois domesticity, or the world of Peter Wächtler’s animated cartoons are simply habitats, each one coming with a set of behaviors, life-forms, movements, objects, images, and relationships. What is a disaster in one is a miracle in another and nothing more than routine in another. Dislocating them or mixing them together short-circuits their logic. To a butler—like the character that so frequently appears in Wächtl

Pretty sure I pronounced Vesna's last name wrong... Opps. But here it is the long awaited conversation and the return of a former host. From the International Museum of Surgical Science... Vesna Jovanovic is a Chicago-based visual artist who specializes in conceptualizations of the human body. Using spilled ink as groundwork, she creates drawings that often formally resemble medical illustration while concentrating on what is usually left out: how it feels and what it means to have a body as well as how the body is culturally perceived. With drawing as a bodily act and medical illustration as a visual trope, Jovanovic brings embodiment, biopolitics, phenomenology, and various other ideas and theories of the human body into her work. http://imss.org/the-oval-portrait/ http://imss.org/rr2016/ http://atom-r.com/  

This week, we join Brian and Patricia as they chat with Bay Area artist, doyenne, and badass Catherine Wagner following a decadent champagne brunch in her studio to ring in the New Year. For over thirty years Catherine Wagner has been observing the built environment as a metaphor for how we construct our cultural identities. She’s examined institutions as various as art museums and science labs, the home and Disneyland. Ms. Wagner’s process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti calls "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves."  While Ms. Wagner has spent her life residing in California, she has also been an active international artist, working photographically, as well as site-specific public art, and lecturing extensively at museums and universities. She has received many major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013-2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and

This week: About a year and a half ago we mourned the passing of a true Chicago legend. Barbara DeGenevieve was an epic instructor, a committed boundary tester, and an enthusiastic gender warrior. Lisa Wainwright did a great job memorializing her on our site and this September Iceberg Projects mounted the first exhibition in honor of her legacy. Dr. Dan Berger, David Getsy, Doug Ischar, and our own Duncan MacKenzie gathered to discuss her exhibition, her story, and what made her the force she was.  Yes. Four white men whose names all begin with D got together to discuss a great woman. Yes we know. Take your fingers away from your keyboards.  Iceberg - http://icebergchicago.com/barbara-degenevieve-medusa%E2%80%99s-cave---iceberg-projects.html   David Getsy Just dropped a new book and announced another. Check it out... http://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Bodies-Sixties-Sculpture-Expanded/dp/030019675X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454291662&sr=8-2&keywords=David+Getsy http://www.amazon.com/Queer-Whitechapel-Do

Epic Chicago cultural legend Anne Elizabeth Moore joins Duncan's Columbia College class "the Late, Late Afternoon Show" for an invasive journey through her history. Abigail Satinsky joins Bad at Sports for a farewell Chicago as she confesses her move to Philadelphia. Moore the warrior of comics, punk rock, anti-capitalism, journalism, and Cambodia's future, recounts her world. Super fun. http://anneelizabethmoore.com/ https://ladydrawers.wordpress.com/ http://ladydrawers.tumblr.com/ http://www.punkplanet.com/    

Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet is composed of forty speakers arranged in eight groups of five, configured as a large oval facing each other in the center of the room, and resting on stands so they are roughly just above eye level. The Motet, as Cardiff referred to it in our conversation, is a reworking of the English composer Thomas Tallis'sSpem in Alium (1570), which translates as “Hope in Any Other” and is sung in Latin by a choir of forty voices. The composition is arranged so that the choir, like the speakers, is divided into eight groups of five singers; each group consists of a soprano, tenor, alto, baritone, and bass. The groups alternate singing: first one, than another, sometimes alone, and at a few moments, all together, rising in a crescendo that breaks open the room to a place beyond the physical world. To hear the Motet in its entirety is profound. Spem in Alium is considered one of the greatest works of English music. The Forty Part Motet is equally a contemporary masterwork. It was a privileg

This week: Amanda believes the children are the future, she thinks you should teach them well and let them lead the way. Amanda wants to show you all the beauty you possess inside. Noah Lyon decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadow, if he fails if he succeeds, at least he'll live as he believes. No matter what we take from you, fine listeners, you are in the art world, you abdicated your dignity second semester your freshman year, who are you kidding. Holy shit those lyrics work really well here.

This week, Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat returns to Bad at Sports, this time from San Francisco, where he sits down with Patricia Maloney. Listeners may remember Kallat’s first appearance on the podcast on the eve of the opening for his large-scale installation, Public Notice 3 (2010-11), in the Fullerton Hall stairwell of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kallat, one of the most prominent figures of contemporary Asian art, works across a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. He was the curator for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India in 2014. This year, Kallat has had several solo exhibitions, including Jitish Kallat: Public Notice 2, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. His Paris exhibition, The Infinite Episode, opened at the Galerie Templon in September 2015. Kallat's large permanent public sculpture unveiled in Austria in October 2015.  His solo exhibitions include Epilogue (2013-14) at the San Jose Museum of Art; Circa at the Ian Potter Museum of

This week we are totally ashamed of Chicago and are collectively horrified by the Tragic death of Laquan McDonald. #blacklivesmatter We are joined by venerable Dread Scott to talk through the problems and possibilities that exist in contemporary America.  

This week: Recorded live on stage September 18, 2015 at Expo Chicago as a part of the Dialogs series, we talk to Nancy Lupo and Laylah Ali! You have to tell them...Soylent Green is people!!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IKVj4l5GU4  

This week we are joined by the Emmy Award winning novelist, screen writer and Chicago based social worker, Ben Tanzer thanks go out to Columbia College Chicago's "Late Late Afternoon Show." Ben's blog and Podcast This Will Change your Life has treated the literary world much like B@S has treated the Contemporary Art world. It is worth checking out.

Real show note to follow.

This week we present an interview recorded live at EXPO Chicago with Latham Zearfoss one of the leaders of a decade long party called Chances Dances. You will have to tune in to almost, but not quite, the end where we actually break a little news. You have time to catch their Gallery 400 show or hit them up on the internet at http://www.chancesdances.org/. Turns Out they know how to party, with everyone. They continue to run two parties a month... THIRD SATURDAYS at The Subterranean 2011 W. North Ave., Chicago, IL 10pm-3am / $5 Cover SECOND TUESDAYS at Danny’s 1959 W. Dickens Ave., Chicago, IL 10pm-2am / FREE