Bad at Sports

This week Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with artist and educator Rafael Salas for a wide-ranging conversation about rural Wisconsin, magical realism, county fairs, country music, identity, and the contested landscapes of contemporary America.
Salas discusses growing up in rural Wisconsin, returning to the Midwest after years in New York, and how his paintings inhabit a space between celebration and unease. The conversation moves from the influence of Wisconsin Death Trip to the political symbolism of county fairs, mixed-race identity, landscape painting traditions, and the challenge of making meaningful contemporary art from outside major art centers.
Name Drops and links: 
Rafael Salas – https://www.rafaelsalas.com/

Door County Contemporary - https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/
Ripon College – https://www.ripon.edu/

Museum of Wisconsin Art – https://wisconsinart.org/

Newcity – https://www.newcity.com/

Michael Lesy (Wisconsin Death Trip) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lesy

Wisconsin Death Trip – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip

Charles Van Schaick – https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/record/image/W0128W2

Mark Tansey – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tansey

Grant Wood – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood

Cormac McCarthy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy

Caspar David Friedrich – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich

Johnny Cash – https://www.johnnycash.com/

Dolly Parton – https://dollyparton.com/

Willie Nelson – https://willienelson.com/

Hank Williams – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Williams

Woody Guthrie – https://www.woodyguthrie.org/

Neil Young – https://neilyoungarchives.com/

Marquette University – https://www.marquette.edu/

John McCain – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain

Sarah Palin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin

Barack Obama – https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/

Recorded live at Door County Contemporary, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller finally correct a seventeen-year oversight and sit down with Chicago gallerist Andrew Rafacz. From the Bucket Rider days in Pilsen to twenty-five years of building a gallery practice rooted in friendship, advocacy, and weird Midwestern generosity, Rafacz reflects on Chicago's changing art scene, the pressures of art fairs, the realities of representation, and why artists shouldn't mistake social media attention for support. Along the way: the Spray Show, shower beers, Cody Hudson, Pace Gallery's roster cuts, and the strange beauty of making things nobody asked for.
Name Drops & Links
Andrew Rafacz Gallery — https://andrewrafacz.com

Cody Hudson — https://www.struggleinc.com/

Michelle Grabner — michellegrabner.com

Mark Bloch — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Bloch_(artist)

Shane McAdams — https://www.shanemcadams.com

Cindy Sherman — https://www.moma.org/artists/5392

Robert Rauschenberg — https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org

Roger Brown — https://www.richardgraygallery.com/artists/estate-of-roger-brown

Nancy Spero — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Spero

Leon Golub — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Golub

Christina Ramberg — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Ramberg

Griffin Goodman — https://www.griffingoodman.com

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

EXPO Chicago — https://www.expochicago.com

One After 909 Gallery —https://oneafter909.org/

Foxy Production — https://www.foxyproduction.com

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

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

Pace Gallery — https://www.pacegallery.com

Gilles Deleuze — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Milwaukee-based artist, curator, musician, and all-around multi-hyphenate Phoenix Brown. The conversation begins with Phoenix's drawings in the Portrait Society exhibition and quickly expands into vulnerability, symbolism, self-healing, lizards from Italy, Midwestern art communities, music, curatorial practice, and the challenges of balancing multiple creative lives.
Phoenix discusses how personal experiences become encoded into a visual language of recurring symbols—flowers, fire, rivers, and tailless lizards—while reflecting on trust, disclosure, and the ways artists reveal themselves through their work without always saying everything outright. 
Phoenix also shares details about their work as curator at the Bronzeville Center for the Arts, efforts to build Milwaukee's first museum dedicated to artists of the African diaspora, and their band Home Going.
Links
Phoenix Brown: https://phoenixbrown.format.com/

Bronzeville Center for the Arts: https://bcamke.org/

Portrait Society Gallery: https://www.portraitsocietygallery.com/

Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD): https://www.miad.edu/

Milwaukee Art Museum: https://mam.org/

Cincinnati Art Museum: https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/

Sculpture Milwaukee: https://www.sculpturemilwaukee.com/

Martine Syms: https://www.martinesyms.com/

CK Ledesma: https://bcamke.org/event/ck-ledesma-if-you-put-your-ear-to-it-you-can-hear-the-waves/

Door County Contemporary https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/

This week on Bad at Sports, Brian Andrews, Ryan Peter Miller, and Duncan MacKenzie sit down with Chicago artist Mindy Rose Schwartz to discuss Countersealed, her recent exhibition at M. LeBlanc Gallery.
The conversation explores a deeply immersive exhibition built around ceramic scorpions emerging from cracks in the gallery floor, glowing bronze aliens, reconstructed fur animals, monumental incense sculptures, woven memorial forms, and a contemporary incantation bowl based on ancient Mesopotamian protective magic. Schwartz discusses material experimentation, memory, ecology, astrology, political anxiety, and the possibility of making art that is simultaneously playful, hopeful, sentimental, and critical.
Name drops and links: 


Mindy Rose Schwartz – https://www.mindyroseschwartz.com
M. Leblanc Gallery - https://mleblancchicago.com/
Louise Bourgeois – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-bourgeois-2351/art-louise-bourgeois
Helen Mirra – https://hmirra.net/
Luba Krejci – https://browngrotta.com/artists/luba-krejci
Dr. Justin Sledge – https://www.esoterica.tv
King's Leap Gallery – https://www.kingsleapfinearts.com/

This week on Bad at Sports, Brian Andrews and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Chicago artist Heather Mekkelson to discuss her recent paired exhibitions, Bass Note at 65GRAND and Snare at Boundary.
Across two installations separated by nearly sixteen miles of Chicago, Mekkelson transforms obsolete communication technologies into sprawling sculptural environments wrapped in jute. The conversation explores technological obsolescence, archaeology, sound, labor, environmental extraction, analog nostalgia, artistic trust, and the strange afterlives of the materials we leave behind.
From bog-preserved artifacts and ancient spears to dead HDMI cables and power distribution boxes, Mekkelson traces the resonances between human invention and human consequence. 
Name Drops and links
Heather Mekkelson — https://www.heathermekkelson.com/
65GRAND — https://www.65grand.com/
Boundary — https://www.boundarychicago.space/
Clacton Spear — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacton_Spear
Ancient Danish Corded Skirt (Egtved Girl context) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egtved_Girl