Wowow! Around an arts and crampy table in an anonymous but lively third space in the Southern Loop of Chicago, some of our top minds and movers convene to chat about past, present and futures of Chicago DIY/DIT artist-organizing. Jesse, Duncan and eventually Ryan — slouches in their own rights — lead by following a disparate flow. A champagne bottle to share with 300 people! Leave a masterpiece, take a masterpiece! Should everything become a library? These notions and more are offered up in a freewheeling conversation that’s not to be missed.
This week Brian and Duncan muse about color with design duo Luftwerk. The Chicago-based collaborative Petra Bachmaier & Sean Gallero entrance us into their series of sculptural light installations using botanical pigments and dynamic lights currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center.
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Everything Must Go, so let’s. Jeffrey Michael Austin — interdisciplinary artist and musician — joins Ryan Peter Miller and Jesse Something Malmed to talk about their reflective new exhibition at the Chicago Art Department. Hope in the dark, illusion, allusion, elusiveness, late capitalism, climate crisis, the collective, the needing-tending, the tenderness of a phrase like *help wanted* and enduring questions of scale and capacity guide our winding conversation. What else?
This week on Bad at Sports, Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney, the filmmakers behind Make A Distinction, join Jesse and the Block Museum’s Curator of Media Arts, Mike Metzger. Make A Distinction is an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it’s urgent for most everyone, especially those of us in the so-called Chicago universe.
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On this week’s Bad at SportsCenter we chatter about with Lan Tuazon. A Chicago-based sculptor, Tuazon discusses the culmination of her 10 year trilogy, Shift in the Order of Things, recently concluding at the Hyde Park Art Center. From Michael Reynolds’ Earthship to Alfred Heineken’s brick bottles, we unpeel a metaphorical onion to reveal the genius at the center of this epic series of “documentation sculpture”. Also, Jesse dubs the nickname “Chi Chi” for this human settlement we call Chicago. Call in and let us know your thoughts.
