Episode 968: Abigail Winograd and Dieter Roelstraete — It’s About Time

by | Sep 5, 2026 | Podcast | 0 comments


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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

Conceptual-art ancestors, fellow travelers, and troublemakers

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

 

Christopher Hudgens
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