Bad at Sports

Latest Episodes:

Bad at Sports Episode 926: Gabriel Barcia-Colombo Feb 11, 2026

Show notes

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo joins Bad at Sports from a rain-soaked tailgate outside the Stony Island Arts Bank, in the middle of Chicago Architecture Biennial programming and an open-hours weekend that turns the city into both subject and stage. A media artist whose work consistently centers human presence inside technological systems, Barcia-Colombo is in Chicago to present Media Stream, a large-scale public artwork that brings the people of Chicago directly onto the architecture they move through every day.

The project is built from hundreds of filmed participants, composited into an algorithmic, ever-changing flow across vertical LED blades embedded in a public building. Contributors are asked to perform ordinary gestures, then to imagine moments of sublimity or loss, producing intimate, vulnerable expressions that are scaled up and encountered by strangers passing through the space. The result is a work that reverses the usual logic of media spectacle, shifting attention away from screens and systems and back toward the faces of people themselves.

From there, the conversation opens into a wide-ranging discussion of digital memory, data after death, and the uneasy permanence of media archives. Barcia-Colombo reflects on early works like Animalia, Chordata, his long-running interest in collecting and containing human presence, and later projects such as The Hereafter Institute, which staged personalized funerals for participants' digital lives. Throughout, the group wrestles with the problem of preservation in media art, from CRT monitors and film projectors to contemporary AI tools that threaten to erase labor, context, and material specificity.

The episode also touches on Barcia-Colombo's collaboration with David Byrne, his role as co-director of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the contradictions of teaching technology as a humanist practice inside systems driven by speed, spectacle, and capitalization. What emerges is a thoughtful meditation on how artists can still create moments of connection and care inside infrastructures not designed for either.

Recorded live, mid-storm, with rain hitting the merch cart and conversation drifting easily between theory, jokes, and deeply personal reflection.

Highlights & Moments

Turning public architecture into a living portrait of the city
LED "blades" as broken, moving images rather than seamless spectacle
Directing strangers to perform the everyday and the sublime
Data, memory, and what happens to our digital lives after death
Early video art as prophecy rather than nostalgia
The problem of preserving media art as technologies disappear
Labor, erasure, and value in digital and AI-assisted work
Teaching technology as a humanist practice at NYU ITP
Collaborating with David Byrne under extreme time constraints
AI as mirror, therapist, and deeply unsettling collaborator

Names Dropped

Stony Island Arts Bank — https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/
Chicago Architecture Biennial — https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
Media Stream - https://150mediastream.com/
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - https://www.gabebc.com/
Times Square public art installations
Animalia, Chordata
The Hereafter Institute
Nam June Paik — https://www.paikstudios.com
Bruce Nauman — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1478
Paul Pfeiffer — https://www.moma.org/artists/4595
Christian Marclay — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay-732
NYU Tisch School of the Arts — https://tisch.nyu.edu
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — https://itp.nyu.edu
Neon Museum, Las Vegas — https://www.neonmuseum.org

Bad at Sports Episode 925: Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) Feb 10, 2026

Show notes

Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) Recorded in Miami during art fair week

Nicholas DiLeonardi joins Bad at Sports from the middle of Miami art fair week, not from a booth but from the pavement between them. Assistant Director and consultant at Gitler&_____, DiLeonardi spends the week moving between fairs, collectors, hammocks, robot dogs, and banana sightings, offering a ground-level view of what art fairs actually feel like when you are advising clients rather than selling from behind a wall.

The conversation moves fluidly from ranking fairs to questioning the psychic cost of sitting in a booth, from the pleasures of approachable painting to skepticism about over-packaged meaning. DiLeonardi talks candidly about advising as a practice, collecting as a responsibility, and why sometimes the best work is the work that does not want to explain itself. Along the way, the group unpacks the strange theater of Art Basel, the social logic of NADA, the pleasures and limits of Untitled, and what it means to keep showing up to a system that is both exhausting and irresistible.

The episode also dives into Gitler&____'s public-facing projects, including the long-running Audubon Mural Project, and the blurred line between consultancy, gallery work, and artist support. It is a conversation about taste, access, labor, exhaustion, and the odd hope that keeps people flying back to Miami year after year.

Recorded live, with roosters, bridges, hammocks, and just enough art world self-awareness to stay funny.

Highlights & Moments

Ranking Miami fairs while openly admitting bias
Why NADA still feels like a New York fair dropped into Miami
Hammocks as both seating and market distortion
Untitled as the gateway fair for first-time collectors
The Beeple robot dog spectacle and the freedom of not knowing how to feel about it
Counting banana references across satellite fairs
"No motive" painting and the desire for unmediated experience
Art advising as a creative practice rather than pure transaction
The psychic toll of booth sitting and forced enthusiasm
Why pre-selling booths feels like theater everyone agrees to perform

Names Dropped:

· Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach

· NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami

· Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com/

· Scope Art Show — https://scope-artshow.com/

· Audubon Mural Project — https://www.audubon.org/muralproject

· National Audubon Society — https://www.audubon.org/

· Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) coverage — https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/beeple-pooping-robot-dogs-at-art-basel-miami-beach-1234765375/

· Robert Moskowitz- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moskowitz

· Andrew Spence- https://andrewspenceart.com

· Western Exhibitions- https://westernexhibitions.com

· Submissions- https://www.submissions.art

· Canada Gallery- https://canadagallery.com

· Mac's Club- https://www.macsclubdeuce.com

· Gitler&____- https://www.gitlerand.com/

Bad at Sports Episode 924: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein is Jerry G part 2 Dec 12, 2025

Show notes

In Part 2 of the Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (Jerry Gogosian) conversation, the discussion turns raw, vulnerable, and deeply structural. Hilde speaks candidly about burnout, public vilification, online pile-ons, and the emotional cost of living as a persona inside an unforgiving attention economy. She describes losing followers overnight, being labeled with extreme political accusations, and watching the art world take visible pleasure in her public failures while remaining silent during her successes.

She recounts the personal toll of constant media exposure, professional pressure, and economic precarity: marriage collapse, total exhaustion, and a year-long withdrawal from work following multiple suicide attempts. Jerry, she explains, has evolved from a meme engine into a living, walking performance — where even the most banal moments of daily life become content whether she wants them to or not. The episode confronts what it means to live as a meme in a broken matrix of attention, validation, and misrecognition.

The conversation pivots into economics and geography. Drawing on her business school training, Hilde walks through quantitative tightening, interest rates, the collapse of NFTs and crypto, and the bursting of the 2022 speculative bubble. She frames art explicitly as a Veblen good — a luxury asset that fails first when the economy tightens. She argues forcefully that New York is no longer an artist city, but a financialized transaction hub. Instead, she advocates for artists to relocate to affordable cities like Chicago or even small towns, building localized collector bases rather than chasing validation from elite centers.

What emerges is a sharp, pragmatic model of survival: cultivate 12 lifelong collectors, embrace regional ecosystems, make work for people you actually live with, and stop imagining museum permanence as the only measure of success. Hilde rejects the mythology of infinite institutional validation, arguing instead for circulation, use, disposal, and lived attachment. The episode closes on the tension between speculation and sustainability, between global markets and local communities, and between career branding and genuine artistic life.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

New Art Dealers Alliancehttps://www.newartdealers.org/

John Waters https://www.johnwaters.com/

Peaches (musician/performer) https://peachesmusic.net/

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) https://www.beeple-crap.com/

Maurizio Cattelan https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/maurizio-cattelan

Brice Marden https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/brice-marden-1577

Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/

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

Roxy Theatre, San Francisco (The Roxie) https://roxie.com/

Soho House https://www.sohohouse.com/

Ice Palace Studios, Miami (Art Fair Venue) https://www.icepalacestudios.com/

New York MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) https://new.mta.info/

Federal Reserve (The Fed) https://www.federalreserve.gov/

Whitney Museum of American Art https://whitney.org/

Chicago, IL https://www.choosechicago.com/

New York City, NY https://www.nyc.gov/

Dahlonega, Georgia https://www.dahlonega.org/

Miami Beach, FL https://www.miamibeachfl.gov/

Basel, Switzerland https://www.basel.com/en

Bad at Sports Episode 923:Jerry Gagosian aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Part 1 Dec 06, 2025

Show notes

At NADA Miami 2025, Bad at Sports' Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known to most of the art world as meme-lord and art-world agent provocateur Jerry Gogosian. In a conversation that swings between dead serious and totally unhinged, Hilde traces the unlikely origin story of Jerry: a near-fatal tick bite in Hudson, NY; weeks in the ICU where she went blind, deaf, and lost the use of her hands and feet; and the eight-month bedridden period that led her to start making art-world memes "six or seven a day" just to stay sane.

She explains how Jerry Gagosian—a name cheekily mashed up from Jerry Saltz and Larry Gagosian—became an anonymous voice for the insiders, registrars, assistants, and "world's oldest interns" of the art world. Positioned "at the cutting edge of stating the obvious," Jerry's memes mined the absurdities of art fairs, galleries, power, and self-seriousness, often circulating so widely that even Arne Glimcher at Pace blasted one to the entire staff. For Hilde, the memes were "fast food," while the deeper writing and podcasting they spawned became the real work.

The episode also dives into Hilde's hatred of artspeak, her love of Pixar movies as real art, and the gulf between what artists claim their work does in press releases and what's actually visible in the work. She riffs on turning incomprehensible exhibition texts into literal film scripts, skewers academic pretense, and praises the raw "holy" feeling of walking into a gallery without any language or theory at all.

In the second half of the conversation, Hilde talks about going to business school at NYU Stern after years inside galleries and the market. Learning macro- and microeconomics, statistics, and reading things like Enron's 10-K filings gave her a new lens on the art world as a distorted, unsustainable luxury market in a broader service-and-finance-based U.S. economy. From there, she and the hosts push into the hard questions: oversupply and under-demand for art, MFA pipelines, self-censorship, the moral theater of "perfect" artists, and why she believes most art schools should probably be consolidated or shut down.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

Jerry Saltz https://www.vulture.com/author/jerry-saltz/

Larry Gagosian https://gagosian.com/

Arne Glimcher https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/arne-glimcher/

Ben Davis https://news.artnet.com/author/ben-davis

Kenny Schachter https://www.artnet.com/artists/kenny-schachter/

Magnus Resch https://www.magnusresch.com/

Barbara Kingsley https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-kingsley-5b6b2411/

Delvin Duarte https://www.instagram.com/delvinduarte/

Keith Boadwee https://www.keithboadwee.com/

NADA Miami https://www.newartdealersalliance.org/

Art Basel Miami Beach https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach

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

Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) https://www.moca.org/

NYU Stern School of Business https://www.stern.nyu.edu/

San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) https://sfai.edu/

SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) https://www.sec.gov/

Enron (corporate reference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Vancouver Art Gallery https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/

Pixar https://www.pixar.com/

Up (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/

Inside Out (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/

Soul (Pixar Film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2948372/

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/

John Wick https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2911666/

Bad at Sports Episode 922: Andi Crist Dec 04, 2025

Show notes

Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank / Chicago Architecture Biennial tailgate

In this wild, funny, and unexpectedly heartfelt tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, Ryan Peter Miller, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with sculptor and arts worker Andi Crist in front of the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The conversation moves fluidly between jokes about heated bamboo floors, fake Uber snacks, soggy bottoms, and bees swarming the microphones — but at its core, the episode is an unusually generous portrait of an artist who's spent years inside the hidden labor structures of museums, galleries, and fabrication shops.

Crist discusses her debut solo museum exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Live Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths. She traces her evolution from preparator and art worker to exhibiting artist, unpacking how years of installing, patching walls, and fabricating for others shaped her own deeply self-aware sculptural practice. Her work twists familiar objects — especially extension cords, wet floor signs, and museum benches — into uncanny, absurd, and often poignant ceramic sculptures.

A major highlight is Crist performing, in full BBC British-schoolmarm mode, the ChatGPT-generated Jane-Austen-style text she inscribed onto a handcrafted wet floor sign. The hosts derail repeatedly into laughter but also probe serious questions about labor visibility, materials, usefulness, and what it means to "gussy up" the hidden structures of the art world and present them as art.

Throughout the episode, Crist reflects on her Southern-to-Chicago shift, her years of preparator culture, the pleasures and irritations of coiling cords, the aesthetics of infrastructure, and her dream of sneaking her replica Art Institute bench into the museum permanently. Her practice sits at the intersection of devotion, mischief, and craft — a perfect "match" for Bad at Sports tailgate chaos.

Andi Crist https://andicrist.com/

EJ Hill https://ejhillart.com/

Jamila James (curator; formerly ICA LA, currently at Carnegie Museum of Art) https://cmoa.org/people/jamila-james/

Justin Witte (Director/Curator, Cleve Carney Museum of Art) https://cod.edu/academics/arts_communications/departments/art/faculty/witte.aspx

Cleve Carney Museum of Art https://theccma.org/

Stony Island Arts Bank https://rebuild-foundation.org/arts-bank/

Chicago Architecture Biennial https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

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

UIC School of Art & Art History https://artandarthistory.uic.edu/

Columbia College Chicago — School of Visual Arts https://www.colum.edu/academics/school-of-visual-arts/

Mary Berry (Great British Bake Off) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Berry

Prue Leith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prue_Leith

Great British Bake Off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_British_Bake_Off

Hobby Lobby https://www.hobbylobby.com/

Michaels https://www.michaels.com/

Play-Doh Fun Factory https://shop.hasbro.com/en-us/product/play-doh-fun-factory/ (representative product link)

Far Side (Gary Larson) https://www.thefarside.com/

Let Me Google That For You (LMGTFY) https://letmegooglethat.com/

Bad at Sports: Episode 921 – Lori Waxman Dec 03, 2025

Show notes

Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago / CAB Tailgate

In this live MCA tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, Brian Andrews, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with Chicago Tribune and Hyperallergic critic Lori Waxman to dig into the past, present, and uncertain future of art criticism.

Lori Waxman speaks candidly about being one of the last remaining "paper critics" in the Midwest, the strange privilege and responsibility of writing for a general audience, and the realities of practicing criticism in a media ecosystem that has largely abandoned it. The conversation moves between the lightly chaotic and the deeply reflective: the team discusses accountability, gatekeeping, democratization, descriptive vs. evaluative criticism, and the uneasy role of critics in shaping a city's cultural memory.

A major portion of the episode is devoted to Waxman's long-running performance project "The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic," which she describes as part-service, part-performance, part-publishing experiment — one that temporarily gives a community something most cities no longer have: a local critic writing about local work. From describing her process of writing in public (fully clothed), to fielding questions about dead artists, visibility, taste, and how critics navigate their own spreadsheets, Waxman opens up her practice with humor and clarity.

The episode also includes reflections on Chicago's art ecology, journalism's collapse, how artists use reviews, and what it means to keep going when the platforms keep disappearing.

Names Dropped — With Links

Lori Waxman 🔗 https://loriwaxman.com/

Duncan MacKenzie 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/duncan/

Brian Andrews 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/brian/

Ryan Peter Miller 🔗 https://ryanpetermiller.com/

Jesse Malmed 🔗 https://jessemalmed.net/

Dan Attoe (artist) 🔗 https://www.danattoe.com/

Jerry Gogosian (Instagram art-world persona) 🔗 https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

Tali Halperin (artist/curator; Chicago-based) 🔗 https://tlihlprn.com/ (closest authoritative source)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) 🔗 https://mcachicago.org/

Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 🔗 https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

Masthead Brewing / Mast Brewing 🔗 https://mastheadbrewingco.com/

Chicago Tribune — Arts 🔗 https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/visual-arts/

Hyperallergic 🔗 https://hyperallergic.com/

Other People's Pixels (artist website hosting) 🔗 https://www.otherpeoplespixels.com/

Documenta 🔗 https://documenta.de/en

WLPN-LP 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio 🔗 https://lumpenradio.com/

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

The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic 🔗 https://60wrdmin.org/

Mavis Beacon (reference to "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing") 🔗 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Beacon

Bad at Sports Episode: 920 Tony Lewis Nov 19, 2025

Show notes

Recorded live at the CAB6 × MCA Tailgate

This episode was recorded as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB6) activation on the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where Bad at Sports staged a series of open-air interviews, community dialogues, and tailgate-style broadcasts. Artists, architects, students, and the public intersected in a shared social space designed for porous conversation. Episode 920 features Tony Lewis, whose practice has shaped Chicago's contemporary drawing discourse for more than a decade.

In this conversation, Tony Lewis joins Bad at Sports for an unscripted outdoor interview on the MCA plaza during the Architecture Biennial. The discussion moves fluidly between Lewis's formative years in Chicago, the evolution of his drawing practice, his relationship to language systems (notably shorthand), and the material intelligence behind works that incorporate rubber bands, graphite, or constraint mechanisms.

Lewis reflects on mentorship, studio discipline, the importance of failure and patience, and the way drawing becomes a long-term conversation with materials. He speaks candidly about the Chicago art ecosystem, the emotional dimensions of his practice, and the shifting sense of scale and intimacy in his recent work — including his Louis Bag series and large graphite constructions.

The episode captures an artist thinking in real time about endurance, attention, vulnerability, and artistic friendship.

· Drawing as a full-body practice: constraint, tension, rubber bands, architecture of line.

· Language + shorthand: transcription, coded systems, linguistic compression.

· Chicago as a site of artistic maturation: community, humility, seriousness.

· Material intelligence: graphite as dust, weight, pressure, residue.

· Patience and endurance: long timelines for developing works.

· Professional evolution: moving from iconic early works to quieter, more intimate forms.

· Artistic friendship and trust: collaboration, studio visits, long-running dialogues.

· Shorthand Drawings / Gregg Shorthand–based works

· Rubber band constructions & torn-grid drawings

· Graphite floor drawings / powder dispersion works

· Louis Bag series

· Wall-based large graphite sheets under tension

NAMES DROP-ed

· Tony Lewis - https://massimodecarlo.com/artists/tony-lewis

· Kevin Beasley (referenced indirectly in relation to material practice) - https://caseykaplangallery.com/artists/beasley/

· Nate Young - https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/36-nate-young/works/

· Theaster Gates - https://www.theastergates.com/

· Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/

· Kerry James Marshall - https://jackshainman.com/artists/kerry_james_marshall

· William Pope.L - https://www.miandn.com/artists/pope-l

· Rodney McMillian - https://vielmetter.com/artists/rodney-mcmillian/

· Amanda Williams - https://awstudioart.com/home.html

· Rashid Johnson - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2830-rashid-johnson/

· Charles Gaines - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/21845-charles-gaines/

· Torkwase Dyson - https://www.torkwasedyson.com/

· Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) - https://mcachicago.org/

· Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

· Shane Campbell Gallery - https://www.shanecampbellgallery.com/

· School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) - https://www.saic.edu/

Image Sarah Hudson

Bad at Sports Episode 919: Kohler, Throckmorton, and Grabner Oct 13, 2025

Show notes

This week, Bad at Sports hits the road and heads north to Sheboygan and Kohler, Wisconsin — where art, industry, and community collide. We drop into the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency program to see how a small Midwestern town sustains one of the most ambitious intersections of art and manufacturing in the country. Michelle Grabner and Jodi Throckmorton.

From toilets to terracotta, brass casting to bathroom design, Kohler has been quietly incubating radical artistic practice for decades, embedding artists in its factories while JMKAC builds a civic platform for art environments, vernacular traditions, and contemporary experimentation. We talk with artists, administrators, and community members about what makes this ecosystem work — and why Sheboygan might just be the weirdest, most wonderful art town in America.

John Michael Kohler Arts Center @jmkacKohler Arts/Industry Residency Kohler Co. @kohler

Name-Drop

Jodi Throckmorton - https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/7932-jodi-throckmorton
Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/
John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) — https://www.jmkac.org/
Kohler Arts/Industry Residency — https://www.jmkac.org/arts-industry/
Kohler Co. — https://www.kohlercompany.com/
Art Preserve (JMKAC's satellite museum) — https://www.jmkac.org/art-preserve/
Arts/Industry Alumni (sampled in conversation):

Beth Lipman — https://www.bethlipman.com/ | @beth_lipman
Ann Agee — https://www.annageestudio.com/
Jeffrey Clancy — https://jeffreyclancy.com/home.html
Ashwini Bhat — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/ashwini-bhat-reverberating-self/
Pao Houa — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/pao-houa-her-the-imaginative-landscape/
Lily Cox-Richard — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/water-sprouts-and-remains-an-unfolding/

Sheboygan community — https://www.townofsheboyganwi.gov/

Bad at Sports Episode 918: Amanda Ross-Ho Oct 09, 2025

Show notes

This week we sit down with Amanda Ross-Ho, whose large-scale sculptures, staged environments, and uncanny translations of domestic and studio life have made her a vital presence in contemporary art. Recorded in Chicago around her latest exhibition, the conversation spans everything from monumental t-shirts to the politics of labor, and from the intimacy of the studio to the spectacle of the art fair.

Ross-Ho reflects on how she mines personal and collective archives, the humor and seriousness in her work, and the ways she uses scale to destabilize the familiar. We also talk about teaching, generational shifts in art-making, and what it means to sustain a practice over the long haul.

Listen & Follow

Amanda Ross-Ho - https://hammer.ucla.edu/made-la-2025/amanda-ross-ho @amandarossho

Name-Drop

Amanda Ross-Ho — https://www.miandn.com/artists/amanda-ross-ho | @amandarossho
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (Gallery) — https://www.miandn.com | @miandn_gallery
Cherry and Martin (Gallery) — https://www.artforum.com/news/los-angeless-cherry-and-martin-gallery-closes-237707/
MoCA Cleveland — https://www.mocacleveland.org/ | @mocacleveland
Whitney Biennial — https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-biennial | @whitneymuseum
Art Basel — https://www.artbasel.com/?lang=en | @artbasel
Frieze Art Fair — https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london | @friezeofficial
Los Angeles art scene / UCLA — https://www.arts.ucla.edu | @uclarts
EXPO CHICAGO - https://www.expochicago.com/
Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

Bad at Sports Episode 917: Two Palms and Alex Slattery Oct 06, 2025

Show notes

This week, we print big or go home. Bad at Sports cast their eyes to New York from the safe confines of the Chicago Architectural Biennial booth at EXPO 2025 to talk with the legendary Two Palms studio in the guise of Alex Slattery. If you've ever stood slack-jawed in front of a monoprint the size of a small car or a woodblock cut so large it needed its own logistics plan, chances are Two Palms was behind it.

Since the 1990s, David Lasry and company have been redefining what printmaking can be—working with artists like Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Peyton, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Terry Winters, Chris Ofili, Dana Schutz, Richard Prince, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, and yes, even channeling the ghost of Andy Warhol. From delicate gestures to total madness with ink and paper, the studio's collaborations are as unpredictable as they are radical.

We talk risk, scale, failure, and discovery—the alchemy of artist–printer collaborations that make Two Palms a force in contemporary art. Along the way we wander through stories of impossible woodblocks, ink disasters turned into triumphs, and why printmaking might just be the most punk medium of them all.

So pour a glass, sharpen your barens, and get ready to nerd out about the future of prints.

Two Palms https://www.twopalms.us/

@twopalmsnyc

Name-Drop

Carroll Dunham — https://www.presenhuber.com/artists/carroll-dunham#tab:slideshow
Elizabeth Peyton — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/elizabeth-peyton
Mel Bochner — http://www.melbochner.net/
Cecily Brown — https://gagosian.com/artists/cecily-brown/
Terry Winters —https://www.terrywinters.org/
Chris Ofili — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/chris-ofili/survey
Dana Schutz — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/dana-schutz
Richard Prince — http://www.richardprince.com/
Chuck Close — https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/chuck-close/
Jeff Koons — https://www.jeffkoons.com/
Two Palms — https://www.twopalms.us/
Marilyn Minter — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/marilyn-minter
Stanley Whitney — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/stanley-whitney
Ana Benaroya — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/ana-benaroya
David Paul Lasry — https://www.nga.gov/artists/21067-david-paul-lasry
Alex Slattery — https://www.instagram.com/alexslattery/
EXPO CHICAGO - https://www.expochicago.com/
Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/

Institutions that love these prints:

Whitney Museum of American Art — https://whitney.org/
MoMA — https://www.moma.org/
The Met — https://www.metmuseum.org/

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected