Bad at Sports

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  –  https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/katherine-ross
Amber Ginsburg  –  https://www.amberginsburg.com/
Lisa Frank  –  https://lisafrank.com/
Pressed Flower  –  https://acreresidency.org/index.php/exhibition/pressed-flower
Call for Clay  –  https://i-n-g-a.com/products/call-for-clay-by-e-saffronia-downing
ACRE Projects  –  https://acreresidency.org/
School of the Art Institute of Chicago — Ceramics  –  https://www.saic.edu/ceramics
Bad Water Gallery (Field Dug Over listing)  –  https://locatearts.org/exhibitions/knoxville/field-dug-over
John Michael Kohler Arts Center  –  https://www.jmkac.org/
Bad at Sports / Bad at Sportscenter  –  https://badatsports.com/
Lumpen Radio (WLPN-LP)  –  https://lumpenradio.com/
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago  –  https://mcachicago.org/
Wissahickon Valley Park  –  https://fow.org/
Mason Stains — Mason Color Works  –  https://www.masoncolor.com/mason-stains
Trapper Keeper — Mead  –  https://www.mead.com/trapper-keeper-details/
Google Maps  –  https://www.google.com/maps

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 – https://www.robertchaseheishman.com/

Mika Horibuchi – https://patrongallery.com/artist/mikahoribuchi

Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) – https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes

PATRON Gallery – https://patrongallery.com/

Let's Go Exploring! – https://patrongallery.com/exhibitions

Chicago Works: Gregory Bae, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago – https://mcachicago.org/whats-on/events/talk-24-7-365-a-roundtable-on-the-life-and-work-of-gregory-bae/

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago – https://mcachicago.org/

School of the Art Institute of Chicago – https://www.saic.edu/

This Thing We Call Art: Gregory Bae – https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/archive/gregory-bae

Two of a Kind: At Patron, Tony Lewis and Gregory Bae Explore How Friendship Impacts One's Artwork, Chicago Reader – https://patrongallery.com/press/item797/Two-of-a-kind-At-Patron-Tony-Lewis-and-Gregory-Bae-explore-how-friendship-impacts-ones-artwork

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 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Nutt
Peter Saul - https://www.moma.org/artists/5178-peter-saul
Chloe Perkis - https://www.chloe-perkis.com/
Big Black - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Black
Spudnik Press - https://www.spudnikpress.org/
Western Exhibitions - https://westernexhibitions.com/
Hoofprint - https://www.hoofprintchicago.com/
Marz Community Brewing - https://www.marzbrewery.com/

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 

Rebecca Morris - bortolamigallery.com 

Richard Estes - nga.gov 

Karen Kilimnik - metmuseum.org 

Richard Prince - gagosian.com 

Elizabeth Peyton - gagosian.com 

Margaux Williamson - bradleyertaskiran.com 

Leanne Shapton - leanneshapton.com 

School of the Art Institute of Chicago - saic.edu 

Spudnik Press - spudnikpress.org 

Process/Process - process-process.com 

Bombon Projects - bombonprojects.com

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 

Francis Bacon - https://www.francis-bacon.com/ 

Toussaint Louverture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toussaint_Louverture

Audre Lorde - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde

bell hooks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks

Esker Foundation - https://eskerfoundation.com/ 

Pilar Corrias - https://www.pilarcorrias.com/ 

Manuel Mathieu Parfums - https://manuelmathieuparfums.com/en