Scholar and curator Faye Gleisser’s book Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 won the 2025 Charles C. Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, and the 2025 committee called Gleisser’swork “gamechanging.” Risk Work is about artists in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, who started using new tactics in response to changes in policing. Rather than creating art that would end up in museums, they showed up in public spaces. A group called Asco staged a photo of a gang war victim. Pope.L started crawling across and along city streets. Gleisser argues that these artists show us how policing and surveillance were intensifying through that period, and that art history and the history of policing and surveillance are not as distinct as we might think.
Alex Chambers talks with Gleisser about her book, and about how art has always been used to enforce power relations as much as to challenge them.
The Buskirk-Chumley feels like a Bloomington institution these days. They get big names, local acts, movie screenings, festivals, and well, other stuff too. But it hasn’t always been that way, it's had ups and down over the last century. Nice Work host Tyler Lake took to the stage to talk to the Executive Director of the Buskirk-Chumley, Steve Versaw about the theater’s history, its packed calendar, how a place like the Buskirk-Chumley fits into the community. You can check out the upcoming events calendar for the Buskirk-Chumley here.
The lead singer of Bloomington rock band Wind, Laura Neville, helps Nice Work host Tyler Lake crawl out from the rock he’s been living under to learn more about “Doom.” A genre of metal heavily inspired by Black Sabbath that uses slower tempos and de-tuned guitars to create a, well, doomy atmosphere. Wind uses big fuzzy sounds, plodding rhythms and explosive guitars to, as Neville says, “take you for a ride.” Their latest record, called Classic Song is a collection of heady, doomy tunes that still makes space for some steel guitar to keep things rooted. You can find Wind on Bandcamp and on Instagram.