Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks

Locks' exhibition operates as a split composition: the back gallery leans into layered, exploratory collage rooted in his teaching experience with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center , while the front gallery delivers sharper, declarative works built around text and figuration. The conversation frames this as a kind of A-side / B-side logic, with one space functioning like improvisational jazz and the other like a stripped-down, urgent punk track. Locks pushes back on easy analogies, but embraces the underlying idea: that both bodies of work are driven by different modes of attention and response. A major thread is process. Locks describes an almost anti-archival system of working, where stacks of Xeroxes, prints, and sampled sounds are mentally cataloged rather than digitally organized. This produces a practice grounded in rediscovery and accident, closer to crate-digging than database searching. Equally central is pedagogy. His decade-plus engagement with incarcerated students becomes a generative force, not a side project. The "homework" he assigns becomes his own studio method, expanding into the work shown here and into related musical output like List of Demands . Throughout, Locks positions his work within a lineage that moves fluidly between comic books, punk ephemera, Black radical print culture, and contemporary art. The result is a practice that refuses clean categorization, operating instead as an ongoing negotiation between sound, image, politics, and community. Names Dropped Duncan MacKenzie — Ryan (Peter Miller) — Damon Locks — Goldfinch Gallery — Lumpen Radio — Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — Stateville Correctional Center — Artists / Art References Charles White — Raymond Pettibon — Emory Douglas — Kerry James Marshall — Music / Punk References Bad Brains — Minor Threat — Government Issue — The Clash — Siouxsie and the Banshees — The Damned — Big Black — Naked Raygun — Black Flag — Comics / Illustration Influences John Byrne — Neal Adams — George Pérez — Marshall Rogers —

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Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks is an episode from Bad at Sports by Bad at Sports.

This episode is 01:10:04 long.

This episode was published on Apr 8, 2026.

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