Bad at Sports

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

Recorded at Gray Gallery
This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Ryan Peter Miller, sit down with legendary British artist John Stezaker inside the unexpectedly elegant library at Gray Gallery. The conversation centers on Stezaker's recent exhibition RAFT and expands into a wide-ranging meditation on collage, photography, landscape, and the strange psychological terrain "between images."
Stezaker reflects on his long-standing practice of working with found imagery, particularly Victorian-era topographical prints and film stills, and how his recent shift into landscape collage emerged during lockdown while living on the coast. What begins as a search for calm quickly mutates into something more unstable, even apocalyptic, mirroring broader cultural and political upheavals.
The conversation touches on risk, intuition, the rejection of intentionality, and the generative power of getting lost in one's own archive. Stezaker's framing of collage as a way to examine the "abyss" between images becomes a central thread, offering a compelling rethinking of how we see, construct meaning, and navigate visual culture.
There's also a candid and surprisingly funny detour into photography skepticism, pedagogy, and the emotional cycles of artistic production, including what Stezaker calls the "terrible moment" between bodies of work.
Names Dropped
John Stezaker — https://www.stezaker.com/
Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/
Ryan Peter Miller — https://www.ryanpetermiller.com/
Gray Gallery — https://graygallery.com/
Maurice Blanchot — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/blanchot/
Slade School of Fine Art — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/
Images Stezaker 2025, courtsey Gray Gallery.

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with Kate Sierzputowski to talk about the evolving identity of EXPO Chicago under Frieze and what 2026 signals for the fair, the city, and the Midwest at large.
Now Director of EXPO, Sierzputowski reflects on scaling up leadership while doubling down on care for Chicago's ecosystem. The 2026 edition marks a shift toward a more curatorial, thematic, and relational fair model: smaller in scale, more intentional in layout, and driven by embedded curatorial frameworks rather than parallel programming.
Major highlights include a deep institutional partnership with the Obama Presidential Center, a rethinking of the fair's floor plan and visitor flow, and a stronger emphasis on Midwest networks and inter-city cultural exchange. Across the conversation, Sierzputowski frames EXPO not just as a marketplace, but as a platform for storytelling, regional identity, and long-term relationship building.
At stake is a bigger question: what does it mean for Chicago to be both global and defiantly local?
 
 
Kate Sierzputowski – EXPO Chicago Director – https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/kate-sierzputowski-director-expo-chicago-essence-harden-1234760346/
Duncan MacKenzie – https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Brian Andrews – https://www.brianandrews.org/
Frieze – https://www.frieze.com/
EXPO Chicago – https://www.expochicago.com/
Obama Presidential Center – https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/
Dr. Louise Bernard – Obama Presidential Center Founding Director – https://www.obama.org/press-releases/obama-foundation-announces-dr-louise-bernard-director-museum-obama-presidential-center/
Katie Pfohl - Detroit Institute of Art – https://www.diaart.org/
https://dia.org/about/media-room/news/detroit-institute-arts-names-katie-pfohl-associate-curator-contemporary-art
Essence Harden –https://www.essenceharden.com/
Independent Curators International – https://curatorsintl.org/
 Images by Leslie Hewett and courtesy of EXPO Chicago

Recorded at the Art Papers Fire Ecology Symposium, Atlanta
Atlanta artist Michi Meko joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews during Art Papers' symposium weekend for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from southern port cities and landscape painting to pandemic solitude, mental health, and the strange spiritual work of making art.
Meko discusses his exhibition So Black and So Blue, a body of work developed between New Orleans and Savannah that reflects on color, history, and the charged atmosphere of southern coastal landscapes. Working with shimmering surfaces, deep blues, blacks, and gilded frames, the paintings operate between abstraction and landscape. They draw viewers into spaces that feel both cosmic and terrestrial, somewhere between daybreak and nightfall. The works are designed to be experienced in person, where layers of marks, reflective materials, and shifting color create movement and depth impossible to capture in photographs.
The conversation expands into the tension between hard-edge abstraction and expressive mark-making. Meko describes his earlier work using nautical signal flags as coded language about survival and buoyancy in America, while also poking at the seriousness of modernist abstraction. From there, the group debates the emotional power of painting, touching on artists like Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly, asking what makes a work spiritually or emotionally resonant and why some paintings leave viewers cold.
A major turning point in Meko's practice came during the COVID-19 shutdown. When Atlanta closed down, he packed his car with camping gear and disappeared into the mountains, spending long stretches alone hiking, fishing, and writing. The period became a personal reckoning. He stopped painting entirely, turned inward, and began confronting anxieties and habits that had previously gone unexamined. Through solitude and outdoor wandering, he reframed landscape not as scenery but as a metaphor for the inner terrain of the mind.
When Meko eventually returned to the studio, that experience reshaped his work. The paintings that emerged began to reflect internal states rather than external views. Horizons divide mind and body. Shimmering skies become metaphors for thought and anxiety. Dense fields of mark-making hold viewers inside the work, drawing them in and out of the image in a restless visual rhythm.
Throughout the conversation, Meko reflects on the strange transformation that can occur through isolation, describing the experience of leaving society and returning "a little feral, a little monk-like," carrying new perspectives about art, masculinity, therapy, and the ways people search for healing.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist navigating between wilderness and studio, darkness and wonder, abstraction and landscape. For Meko, painting becomes both exploration and survival, a way of mapping the landscapes inside ourselves.
Name Drop List (Bad at Sports style)
Michi Meko - https://www.michimeko.com

Art Papers - https://www.artpapers.org/
Duncan MacKenzie - https://kurasmackenzie.com/

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

Louis Armstrong - https://www.louisarmstronghouse.org

Mark Rothko - https://www.markrothko.org

Rothko Chapel - https://www.rothkochapel.org

Ellsworth Kelly - https://ellsworthkelly.org

Bob Ross - https://www.bobross.com

J. M. W. Turner - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jmw-turner-558

Thomas Cole - https://thomascole.org

The Goat Farm Arts Center - https://goatfarmartscenter.com

New Orleans

Savannah

Gulf of Mexico

Recorded during Miami art week at NADA, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with artists Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias to talk about painting, fiber, migration, labor, and the strange textures of building an art practice across borders.
Vargas Bravo and Lemonias both arrived at NADA through Andrew Rafacz Gallery, but their paths into the fair and into the United States are very different. Vargas Bravo, a painter originally from Mexico City and currently completing graduate studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, discusses work that reimagines familiar structures of division. Her paintings pull from the visual language of Western painting while subverting its traditions, including a monumental image of a collapsed chain-link fence that imagines the fall of structures meant to separate and contain. The conversation moves through borders as both literal and symbolic constructs, and how living in Chicago has reshaped the stakes of the work.
Lemonias, a Jamaican-born artist working in fiber and print processes, describes a practice rooted in care labor, migration, and material culture. Drawing from her experiences as a nanny in the United States, Lemonias incorporates children's clothing, food packaging, and other domestic remnants into textile works that trace the economies of caregiving and consumption. The materials themselves carry the stories of the households they passed through, mapping the intersection of labor, class, and migration that often remains invisible in the art world.
Along the way the discussion opens into a larger conversation about mentorship, access, and the informal knowledge that structures the art ecosystem. Lemonias reflects on learning the unwritten rules of American cultural institutions while navigating race, class, and belonging, while Vargas Bravo speaks about the complicated promise of the "American dream" from the perspective of an international artist whose time in Chicago has included both opportunity and trauma. Both artists also unpack the evolving relationships between artists and galleries, describing representation less as a hierarchy than as a collaborative process built on trust and dialogue.
Recorded amid the hum of the fair floor at New Art Dealers Alliance during Miami art week, the conversation moves easily from the practical realities of art fairs to the deeper social forces shaping contemporary practice. The result is a candid and thoughtful exchange about what it means to make work in a world structured by borders, labor, and the fragile networks that allow artists to keep going.
Name Drop List
Berenice Vargas Bravo — https://berenicevargasbravo.com Krystal Lemonias — https://www.krystallemonias.com Andrew Rafacz Gallery — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Andrew Rafacz — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Janelle Dawson — https://www.janelledawson.com School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) — https://www.saic.edu NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://www.newartdealers.org EXPO Chicago — https://www.expochicago.com Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com Bazaar Magazine (France) — https://www.bazaar.fr