Bad at Sports

What if the problem with Chicago's art world isn't a shortage of artists, galleries, institutions, or ideas—but a shortage of connective tissue?
This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie sits down at the Gertie Hub with Gertie founder Abby Pucker and Head of Programming, Partnerships & Membership Chanelle Lacy for a conversation about building audiences, building collectors, and building cultural infrastructure in Chicago.
The story starts with Gertie's origin: Abby's long-running interest in getting people into the same room, her return to Chicago during COVID, and a listening tour that revealed a strange contradiction. Chicago had museums, galleries, artists, spaces, and ambitious programming everywhere—but plenty of people still felt like they had nowhere to go and no way into the culture. Gertie emerged as an attempt to close that gap.
From there, the conversation becomes a much bigger argument about Chicago. Why does the city produce so many remarkable artists and cultural workers while remaining so difficult for mid-career artists to sustain? When does Chicago's legendary self-reliance become a silo? What happens when "we don't care what New York thinks" stops being freedom and starts becoming a defensive posture? And what kind of infrastructure would make it easier for artists to stay, return, grow, and find audiences here?
That leads directly into Chicago Exhibition Week, running September 14–20, 2026: Gertie's citywide effort to make Chicago's existing cultural ecosystem radically easier to enter. Abby and Chanelle talk maps, directories, marketing, partnerships, galleries, museums, new collectors, and the deceptively difficult work of getting people off Instagram and through the door.
Along the way, Duncan asks the most basic—and maybe hardest—question: what is the value argument for art? Chanelle answers that art lets us see the world through someone else's eyes and creates a context for difficult conversations. Abby talks about curiosity, connection, discovery, and the pleasure of feeling "in on" a cultural conversation. All three keep circling the same problem: who is building new art fans now?
The discussion also wanders happily through Riot Fest, music-festival graphics, the Armory, Coachella, Lollapalooza, art fairs, neighborhood galleries, collecting, Chicago parking, and the possibility of turning a finance professional into an art freak.
Then the radio fades out...
In the internet-only nugget, the conversation gets into the brass tacks: Gertie Curious and Gertie Curated, membership programming, collection and studio visits, cultural travel, and the relationship between membership and the organization's public-facing work. From there, Abby and Duncan go deep on a question Bad at Sports has wrestled with for years: why build a cultural organization as a for-profit instead of a nonprofit?
That opens a long discussion about philanthropy, grants, mission creep, institutional agility, donor power, KPIs, governance, learned dependency, the economics of culture, and whether an art industry can be sustained almost entirely by galleries, auction houses, and charitable giving.
The answer, at least here, is not especially tidy—which is why it is worth listening to.
It may, however, begin with Abby's simplest proposition:
It's cool to care.
NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING
Guests / Gertie
Gertie — https://www.gertie.co/

Abby Pucker / Chanelle Lacy / Gertie team — https://www.gertie.co/about

Gertie membership — https://www.gertie.co/membership

Gertie Instagram — @gertie.chicago — https://www.instagram.com/gertie.chicago/

Chicago Exhibition Week
Chicago Exhibition Week 2026 — September 14–20, 2026 — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/

CXW 2026 map — https://www.chicagoexhibitionweek.com/2026-map

Gertie exhibitions discussed
82 Nights Only* — September 16–December 13, 2026, Gertie Hub — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/82-nights-only

Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015 — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/over-my-head

Ornament & Information — Chicago Cultural Center — https://www.gertie.co/exhibitions/ornament-and-information

Earlier projects / people
Art in Common — co-founded by Zoe Lukov — https://www.artincommon.art/about-2

Zoe Lukov — https://www.zoelukov.com/about-mission — Instagram: @zoelukov

Next Stop: Chicago — https://www.nextstopchicago.co/

Neighbors art fair — https://www.neighbors.art/

Mirka Serrato / Neighbors background 

Vic Mensa — Next Stop: Chicago.

Chicago art ecosystem / venues
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago — https://mcachicago.org/

Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.artic.edu/

The Renaissance Society — https://www.renaissancesociety.org/

Chicago Cultural Center — https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/chicago_culturalcenter.html

SECRIST | BEACH — https://secristbeach.com/

Spudnik Press Cooperative — https://www.spudnikpress.org/

Corbett vs. Dempsey — https://corbettvsdempsey.com/

Recess — https://recesschicago.com/

All Together Now — https://www.alltogethernow.fun/

SVRN — https://www.svrn.com/

Music / festival / cultural comparisons
Riot Fest — https://riotfest.org/

Mike "Riot Mike" Petryshyn — Riot Fest founder

The Armory Show — https://www.thearmoryshow.com/

Lollapalooza — https://www.lollapalooza.com/

Coachella — https://www.coachella.com/

Knockdown Center — https://knockdown.center/

Membership-program references
The Joffrey Ballet — https://joffrey.org/

Lyric Opera of Chicago — https://www.lyricopera.org/

Art Basel Paris — https://www.artbasel.com/paris

Other institutions / art-market references
Gagosian — https://gagosian.com/

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — https://www.moma.org/

Barnes Foundation — https://www.barnesfoundation.org/

Bad at Sports — https://badatsports.com/

Lumpen Radio / WLPN 105.5 FM — https://lumpenradio.com/

What if the most radical thing an artist can do right now is… take their time?
This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with curators Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete, a.k.a. DRAW, to talk about their recent GRAY Chicago exhibition, IT'S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago.
Originally conceived under the much more dangerous title "Slacker Conceptualism," the exhibition gathers ten Chicago-based or Chicago-trained artists around a shared suspicion of productivity, professionalism, polish, legibility, self-branding, and the endless demand that artists explain themselves.
The conversation starts with artists who take years to finish paintings, lean things against walls rather than attach them, make objects that seem almost perversely uninterested in becoming commodities, and cultivate what Abigail and Dieter call a kind of "studied nonchalance."
From there, things get bigger.
What does it mean to make political art without making your politics immediately legible? What happens when opacity becomes an act of resistance? Can refusing productivity itself be political? Why does Chicago—with its strange combination of universities, affordable-ish space, artist-run culture, deep pedagogical histories, and relative distance from the market machinery of New York—make this particular kind of artistic life possible?
Along the way we get Pope.L, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Michael Asher, Bas Jan Ader, Josef Strau, Cologne in the 1990s, Gen-X slackerdom, cringe comedy, unfinished paintings, unopened packages, boats, sawhorses, kitchen cabinets, artist losers, artist attitudes, the fetish of identity, the problem with virtue signaling, and the revolutionary possibility of simply refusing to hustle.
And then the radio turns off.
In the web-only afterparty, the conversation expands into earlier generations of Chicago conceptualism, center-versus-periphery arguments, the weird provincialism of assuming New York remains the center of American art, and finally the uncomfortable relationship between art schools, enormous tuition bills, professionalization, and the economic pressure placed on young artists to turn artistic practice into a viable career.
Is the artist supposed to produce? Explain? Sell? Educate? Perform an identity? Change the world?
Or can you just be an artist?
Apparently, in Chicago, you can at least try.
NAME DROPS / FURTHER READING
The exhibition
IT'S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago — GRAY Chicago, July 10–August 22, 2026. Exhibition text, artists, checklist, installation views, and curatorial essay: GRAY — IT'S ABOUT TIME
DRAW — the curatorial collaboration of Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete. The exhibition page includes biographies of both curators: DRAW / GRAY exhibition page
Curators
Abigail Winograd — independent curator and writer; co-curator/co-commissioner of Jeffrey Gibson's 2024 U.S. Pavilion and former Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow: Abigail Winograd — Neubauer Collegium
Dieter Roelstraete — curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago; former MCA Chicago curator and documenta 14 curatorial team member: Dieter Roelstraete — Neubauer Collegium
Artists in IT'S ABOUT TIME
Alex Chitty: alexchitty.com
Shir Ende: shirende.com
Max Guy: maxguy.studio
Jinn Bronwen Lee: jinnbronwenlee.com
Dave Lloyd — see the GRAY exhibition page for works and installation views: Dave Lloyd in IT'S ABOUT TIME
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle — artist information and website
Devin T. Mays — see the GRAY exhibition page: Devin T. Mays in IT'S ABOUT TIME
Pope.L: Pope.L — MoMA
Nick Raffel — see the GRAY exhibition page: Nick Raffel in IT'S ABOUT TIME
Miao Wang — see the GRAY exhibition page: Miao Wang in IT'S ABOUT TIME
Conceptual-art ancestors, fellow travelers, and troublemakers
Michael Asher — conceptual artist and legendary CalArts teacher whose practice becomes an important reference point in the conversation: Michael Asher — CalArts / MOCA overview
Bas Jan Ader — particularly In Search of the Miraculous and Ader's subsequent association with failure, romantic conceptualism, and the mythology of the "artist loser": Bas Jan Ader — Estate / Meliksetian | Briggs
Josef Strau — artist and author of "The Nonproductive Attitude," one of the central intellectual reference points for the exhibition: Josef Strau — Whitney Museum
Christopher Williams - https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/christopher-williams
Lawrence Weiner - https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/70-lawrence-weiner/
Günther Förg - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/19427-gunther-forg/
Martin Kippenberger - https://www.maxhetzler.com/artists/martin-kippenberger
Albert Oehlen - https://gagosian.com/artists/albert-oehlen/
Bennett Simpson - https://heni.com/news?artist=Bennett%20Simpson
Hannah Arendt - https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/
Sigmund Freud - https://www.freud-museum.at/en/
Dan Peterman - http://www.danpeterman.com/
Michelle Grabner - https://www.jamescohan.com/artists/michelle-grabner
Josh Kline - https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/josh-kline
Institutions / places
GRAY Chicago
Renaissance Society
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
University of Chicago
Northwestern University
University of Illinois Chicago
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Columbia College Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
MCA Chicago
ICA Boston
Regards Gallery
Image:
Dieter Roelstraete and Abigail Winograd
Photo by Robert Chase Heishman. Image courtesy of
GRAY Chicago/New York

Blurb:
 
Daniel Tucker interviews Georgia Kotretsos about her work with the ΤΗΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ SOCIETY which is conceived of as a Arts & Culture Research Lab Observatorium with projects throughout Greece and beyond. This interview was conducted at the Twenty-First International Conference on the Arts in Society conference "Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies" at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. 
 
Bio:
Georgia Kotretsos is a visual artist, researcher, the founder of the nonprofit organization THE ΤΕΛΟΣ SOCIETY, Arts & Culture Research Lab Observatorium, in Athens, Greece and the publisher of TTS Press, which operates in the field of cultural studies and art research in Greece, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. TTS focuses on the Greek periphery, the islands, and remote areas. It creates interdisciplinary teams tailored for each project, working collaboratively on site-specific intangible projects that uncover the unique aspects of each locale.
TTS publications are available at the following bookstores: Politeia, Ianos, Museum of Cycladic Art, Iambos, Pixel,and Public (online). Through these endeavors, THE TEΛΟΣ SOCIETY highlights the importance of contemporary art and cultural heritage while fostering new creative perspectives and audiences. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA, 2004), where she studied on a full merit-based scholarship, and a BFA from the Durban Institute of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (2000), where she relocated as a teenager during the country's post-apartheid transition.
Her work systematically critiques conventional theoretical positions on viewing and perceiving artworks, seeking—through liberatory and anarchic visual practices—to reveal that the experience of viewing is site-specific, and that the emancipation of the viewer is a crucial source of artistic knowledge. Her research-based approach—whether in the form of artwork, text, or interview—resists traditional forms and historical modes of acquiring knowledge, proposing alternative methodologies for its creation and reception.
Her work has been presented both in Greece and internationally, including at the Onassis Art Center and the Asia Society in New York, the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Tinguely Museum (Basel), La Kunsthalle (Mulhouse), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), and the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis. She has held seven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous significant international initiatives, including the 56th Venice Biennale, MediaImpact in Moscow, and FIELD MEETING in New York.
From 2006 to 2010, she co-founded the independent art space Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, USA—an alternative contemporary art laboratory—and served as editor-in-chief of BootPrint, a biannual journal by and for artists. From 2009 to 2013, she served as a columnist for Art21 Magazine of PBS Arts Feature in New York, with her column Inside the Artist's Studio. In 2014, her writing was also published on LABKULTUR.TV in Germany. In 2019, Kotretsos published a report on the arts in Greece reflecting on the decade of recession 2008-18 entitled "Athens is the Only Cave in the World that has a Skylight" for the Field Journal in the US. 
Her works are held in private collections, including the National Bank of Greece, the Mamidakis Foundation, and others.
More information about her work can be found at:
 www.georgiakotretsos.com | www.thetelossociety.com

 Georgia Kotretsos portrait for RTIN by Kostas Pappas
and the TTS Logo

Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Claire Ashley at the Door County Contemporary Art Fair for a conversation that wanders from broken-down minivans to Scottish standing stones, from inflatable sculpture to protest aesthetics, and from the economics of artistic survival to the philosophy of color.
Ashley discusses nearly two decades of building monumental inflatable sculptures that refuse to stay still—works that exist somewhere between architecture, bodies, creatures, performance, and public intervention. They explore why artists should embrace experimentation, why humor can be politically powerful, and how softness, absurdity, and vulnerability can become serious sculptural strategies.
Links
Claire Ashley — https://clairehelenashley.com/

Door County Contemporary Art Fair — https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/

Lee Bontecou — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Bontecou

Nick Cave — https://nickcaveart.com/Main/Intro.html

Paul McCarthy —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCarthy

José Lerma — https://kavigupta.com/artists/42-jose-lerma/

Weisman Art Museum — https://wam.umn.edu/

Cameron Art Museum — https://cameronartmuseum.org/

Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel — https://www.saintkatearts.com/

Callanish Standing Stones — https://www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/places/calanais-standing-stones/

Isle of Lewis — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Lewis

Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist, curator, arts administrator, and Door County Contemporary co-founder Jaymee Harvey Willms for an unexpectedly personal and funny conversation.
What begins as a discussion about goats unfolds into an exploration of grief, religious deconstruction, contemporary art, and the rituals we create to survive profound loss.
Once a painter immersed in saturated color, Jaymee found herself unable to tolerate color at all, turning instead toward broken ceramics, white paint, damaged objects, and sculptures that ask what it means for something broken to continue functioning.



Links
Jaymee Harvey Willms
http://www.jaymeeharveywillms.com/
Door County Contemporary
https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/
Familiar (Milwaukee)
https://www.familiarmke.com/
Walker Art Center
https://walkerart.org/
Mary Gabriel — Ninth Street Women
https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell/citations/ninth-street-women
Lee Krasner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Krasner
Jackson Pollock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock
JoAnne Carson
https://joannecarson.com
Adam Frelin
https://adamfrelin.com
Hair + Nails
https://hairandnailsart.com