Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins

Art Papers, Fire Ecology, and Ending Well This week on Bad at Sports, we sit down in Atlanta with Sarah Higgins , Executive and Artistic Director of Art Papers , during the Art Papers symposium. What unfolds is a candid, generous, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about what it means to end something well . As Art Papers approaches its final chapter after nearly 50 years, Higgins lays out a model for institutional closure that resists panic, rejects compromise, and instead asks: what if ending is a form of contribution? From the "fire ecology" framework to radical transparency about budgets, labor, and sustainability, this conversation moves from grief to strategy to something like collective possibility. Along the way: the death of art criticism models, nonprofit fatigue, Chicago parallels, and why maybe nobody is coming to save us. Names Dropped (Bad at Sports style) Sarah Higgins — Art Papers — Brian Andrews — Duncan MacKenzie — Art Papers Symposium — New Art Examiner — Dan Talley — Laura Lieberman — Real Art Ways — Critical Minded — Ponce City Market — Jamestown — National Endowment for the Arts — Mary Louise Schumacher — Lucy – Scarlett Johansson – Morgan Freeman –

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Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins is an episode from Bad at Sports by Bad at Sports.

This episode is 57:36 long.

This episode was published on Apr 19, 2026.

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