Apr 19, 2026
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 — https://www.artpapers.org
Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org
Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/
Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Art Papers Symposium —
https://www.artpapers.org
New Art Examiner — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Art_Examiner
Dan Talley — https://www.artpapers.org
Laura Lieberman — https://www.artpapers.org
Real Art Ways — https://realartways.org
Critical Minded — https://criticalminded.org
Ponce City Market —
https://www.poncecitymarket.com
Jamestown — https://www.jamestownlp.com
National Endowment for the
Arts — https://www.arts.gov
Mary Louise Schumacher —
https://www.marylouiseschumacher.com
Lucy –
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/futurisms/the-muddled-message-of-lucy
Scarlett Johansson – https://scarlett-johansson.net/
Morgan Freeman – https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/f/fo-fz/morgan-freeman/