Episode 903: Jake Nickell & Lance Curran of Threadless
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This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller cruise their way into a murder mansion fever dream with Jake Nickell and Lance Curran, two of the minds behind Threadless—the Chicago-based t-shirt empire that helped invent crowdsourced artwear before we’d marketed terms like “creator economy” or “drop ship.”
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (5/22-5/28)
1. Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Marked May 22, 6-9PM Tala: 1644 W Chicago Ave 2. C. C. Ann Chen: Whereabouts May 24, 6-8PM Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago: 2233 S Throop St 3. Caroline David: Red May 24, 5-8PM Prairie: 2055 W Cermak Rd 4. Tom Torluemke:...
Episode 902: David Schilter and Pedro Vieira de Moura
Recorded live at the Comics Without Borders / Sans Frontières gathering at Rice University, this episode dives deep into international comics publishing, aesthetic risk-taking, and how underground networks drive a truly global comics culture.
Episode 901: Florencia Rodriguez and CAB 6
In this episode, we sit down with architect, editor, and curator Florencia Rodriguez, Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 6. We dig into the ideas shaping this year’s edition—titled “Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change”—and her approach to curating a biennial that centers transformation, public space, and critical imagination.
Episode 900: Robert Pruitt
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For our milestone 900th episode, we headed to Houston and sat down with the brilliant Robert Pruitt, live at the Cats Conference: Comics Sans Frontières—a gathering of artists, thinkers, and cultural workers reshaping the future of comics, narrative, and speculative visual worlds.
Episode 899: Jessica Snow & Liga Spunde
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Gremlins, Borders, and Recipes for Resistance
This week we’re joined by Jessica Snow and Liga Spunde, two artists navigating the world through comics, street theater, and occasionally letterpress and photoshop.
Episode 898: Wafaa Bilal and Bana Kattan
This week. Dana’s back?
She and Duncan sit down with artist Wafaa Bilal and curator Bana Kattan to discuss Bilal’s powerful and deeply personal mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Known for his provocative, often participatory works that grapple with war, trauma, displacement, and surveillance, Bilal has long made the body both a site of resistance and a vessel of memory.
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (5/15-5/21)
1. Grishma Shah: Dissonance May 16, 7-9PM Bridgeport Art Center: 1200 W 35th St 2. Amira Diaw: I too pass from the night May 17, 6-8PM Hardboiled: DM For Address 3. Maxwell Volkman & Alex Adkinson: The River Sweats with Oil and Tar May 17, 6-9PM...
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (5/8-5/14)
1. Eshan Rafi: my father’s imagination May 8, 7PM Roman Susan: 1224 W Loyola Ave 2. Lauren Iacoponi and Millicent Kennedy: All Houses Are Haunted May 9, 6-9PM Purple Window Gallery: 2233 S Throop St, Unit 845 3. Tatiana Jackson: In the Flow of Bloom May...
Sub-Rural #49, Caroline Kent
Art language and its framing is an asymmetric consolidation between principal hemispheric archives and their constituent artists and crafters. Place introduces alternative possibilities for visual fluency and it sanctions regional myths, schedules, and texts. Official...
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (5/1-5/7)
1.Chang-Ching Su: A Dream Cast in Dormancy (Even Shadows Glow in the Dark) May 3, 5-8PM Murmuration: 2846 W North Ave 2. How to See in the Dark May 2, 7-10PM Co-prosperity Sphere: 3219 S Morgan St Work by: Alberto Ortega Trejo, Dakota Gearhart, Eva Davidova,...
TOP V FROM EXPO CHICAGO 2025
Welcome to this week’s TOP V from EXPO CHICAGO at Navy Pier. Also, don’t forget to check out our TOP V from BARELY FAIR and this week’s TOP V for a selection of provocative programs being exhibited in spaces both large and small around Chicago this weekend. 1. Claire...
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (4/24-4/30)
1. Amanda Rice: From Sunlight to Extinction April 25, 7-8PM 4th Ward Project Space: 5338 S Kimbark Ave 2. Irene Wa.: where i seek i find April 27, 5-8PM .liminal.projects.: DM for address 3. Anaïs Morales and Dom Smith: Fly by Night April 26, 7-9PM...
TOP V FROM BARELY FAIR 2025
Welcome to this week’s TOP V from BARELY FAIR in the Mckinley Park neighborhood. Also, don’t forget to check out this week’s TOP V Thursday morning a selection of provocative programs being exhibited in spaces both large and small around Chicago this weekend. 1....
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (4/17-4/23)
1. Curtis Anthony Bozif and Shona Macdonald: The Vapours So Whiten and Thicken the Air April 19, 5-8PM Studio Break Gallery: 1N046 Ridgeland Ave, West Chicago 2. Joanne Greenbaum: Lucky 13 April 19, 5-9PM Hans Goodrich: 1747 S Halsted St 3. What...
TOP V. WEEKEND PICKS (4/10-4/16)
1. karolina gnatowski: Never, Again! April 11, 5-9PM Color Club: 4146 N Elston Ave 2. Hannah Gebhart: Tension & Release April 12, 5-9PM Izora Contemporary (Pop Up): 1002 W Leland Ave, (Remedy Physical Therapy and Wellness) 3. Slipcover April 11,...