Bad at Sports Episode 976: Tony Lewis and Bosco Bae

Duncan MacKenzie and Jesse Malmed sit down with artist Tony Lewis and Bosco Bae, brother of the late Chicago artist Gregory Bae (1986–2021), for a moving, funny, and candid conversation recorded live at PATRON Gallery in Chicago.

The occasion is Let's Go Exploring!, a two-person exhibition bringing together work by longtime friends and studio mates Tony Lewis and Gregory Bae. But what begins as a conversation about an exhibition quickly becomes something more complicated: an exploration of friendship, loss, memory, artistic responsibility, and the strange business of keeping an artist's work alive after their death.

Tony and Bosco recount the collective efforts to preserve Gregory's work, from moving the contents of his studio and organizing the artist-led archival project CV to making curatorial decisions that Gregory himself might not have agreed with. What should survive? What gets exhibited? Who has the authority to decide? And how can an archive remain experimental, generous, and alive rather than becoming a monument to a fixed history?

The group considers the ethics of recreating artworks, a bonsai that might be both alive and doomed, Tony's enormous graphite basketball-court drawing, the politics of Asian American identity, and the sometimes extraordinary generosity of Chicago's artistic community.

The exhibition's title comes from the final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Name Drops and links:

Tony Lewis – https://patrongallery.com/artist/tonylewis/cv

Bosco Bae - https://boscobae.com/ Gregory Bae – https://patrongallery.com/artist/gregorybae

Josh Dihle – https://www.joshdihle.com/

Robert Chase Heishman – https://www.robertchaseheishman.com/

Mika Horibuchi – https://patrongallery.com/artist/mikahoribuchi

Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) – https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes