This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Milwaukee-based artist, curator, musician, and all-around multi-hyphenate Phoenix Brown. The conversation begins with Phoenix's drawings in the Portrait Society exhibition and quickly expands into vulnerability, symbolism, self-healing, lizards from Italy, Midwestern art communities, music, curatorial practice, and the challenges of balancing multiple creative lives.

Phoenix discusses how personal experiences become encoded into a visual language of recurring symbols—flowers, fire, rivers, and tailless lizards—while reflecting on trust, disclosure, and the ways artists reveal themselves through their work without always saying everything outright.

Phoenix also shares details about their work as curator at the Bronzeville Center for the Arts, efforts to build Milwaukee's first museum dedicated to artists of the African diaspora, and their band Home Going.

Links

Phoenix Brown: https://phoenixbrown.format.com/
Bronzeville Center for the Arts: https://bcamke.org/
Portrait Society Gallery: https://www.portraitsocietygallery.com/
Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD): https://www.miad.edu/
Milwaukee Art Museum: https://mam.org/
Cincinnati Art Museum: https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/
Sculpture Milwaukee: https://www.sculpturemilwaukee.com/
Martine Syms: https://www.martinesyms.com/
CK Ledesma: https://bcamke.org/event/ck-ledesma-if-you-put-your-ear-to-it-you-can-hear-the-waves/
Door County Contemporary https://www.doorcountycontemporary.com/