Nice Work

This, sadly, is the last episode of Nice Work. It was a good run, but a short one. The first episode of Nice Work aired on October 10, 2025. We were genuinely excited by what we could do, and now nine months later we are still excited about what we made. Since this is our last episode, we'll spend it reflecting on what we did, and why we did it. As well as playing some of our favorite moments in t...

This week on Nice Work, painter Peter Shear sits down with Tyler Lake to talk about Accident Report a collection of his work from 2019-2022. Cicada Cinema has big plans for a future brick and mortar location, and Alex Chambers gives us something to chew on with a story about Edgar Allen Poe’s hair at the Lilly Library.

Kayte Young talks with Ceramicist Claire Miller about her delicate works that embracing fragility and the allure of a thing clearly made by a human hand. And we talk with sculptor Melanie Pennington about her statue of AIDS activist Ryan White that unveiled this week at the IU Memorial Union.

About three weeks ago, our co-host Kayte Young brought poet and writer Ross Gay into the studio for an interview. That was Kayte’s last interview. Our dear friend and colleague died on Sunday, May 31st.  Kayte nourished our community as an artist, a gardener, a cook, a beekeeper, and a storyteller who believed in the power of creative expression — especially public radio — to bring people together...

Filmmaker Boots Riley’s latest film I Love Boosters hit theaters last weekend. Nice Work’s Alex Chambers spoke with Riley at a live event on the IU campus. They talked about making TV versus making movies, and how either could get people involved in working class social movements. Then we check in with Pillar Arts and tune in to the Bloomington Amateur Radio Club.  

Kay Sargent on neuroinclusive interior design. This summer’s Granfalloon. And your hosts talk about a few items you should check out. If you want.

Kayte has a friend who is into miniatures. She makes them herself, pottery mostly, but she also goes to shows and connects with miniaturists all over the world. She wanted Kayte to check out the biggest miniatures show in the Midwest, the Dick Bishop International in Chicago. She said it was mind blowing.   Kayte went to the show. And it was indeed very impressive. But what she found most compelli...

Kayte Young goes to the biggest miniatures show in the Midwest and comes back to Bloomington to ask a friend: why make miniature things? Tyler Lake brings us an obituary for the Orbit Room. And a Tiny Desk entrant raps in Louisiana Creole. 

This week on Nice Work we talk with writer Karol Lagodzki about his novel Controlled Conversations , set during a period of martial law in Poland in the early 1980’s. We check in with one of WFIU’s Local Favorites from the NPR Tiny Desk Contest: Bloomington band The Foolins, and we preview the Mini Midwest Print Fest.

Here’s a premise for a story. A 66-year-old woman,let’s call her Celeste, has been divorced twice and has basically given up on love. Then she meets Max. He helps with her taxes, gives her gardening tips, and then she falls in love with him. The first twist is: Max is an AI Chatbot. The second twist is that Celeste is a real person, in a story published by the New York Times just a few weeks ago....

The Kismet Magazine put out their first issue in September, 2024. The physical copy is a booklet stitched together with black thread. On the cover is a black and white image of planet Earth with roots or tentacles coming out of the South Pole, a couple of orbital rings, and a pagoda-like building on the North Pole. Other, smaller, tentacular Earths float around it in space. Open it up and you’ll s...

At the end of every academic year, the Eskenazi School of Art Architecture and Design presents a thesis show including work from each of the graduating Master of Fine Arts students. The show is a professional exhibit in the Grunwald Gallery in the Fine Arts Building on the IU campus in Bloomington. To accommodate the graduating students, and to give their work room to breathe, they divide them int...

Jesse Thorn has been interviewing comedians and hip-hop artists and other creative people for over twenty-five years. He started with a college radio show and he just kept going. His show, The Sound of Young America, got picked up by public radio stations, and he eventually changed the name to Bullseye, probably because he was no longer quite so young. Maybe you’ve heard of Bullseye. Maybe, as a W...

Jesse Thorn has been interviewing comedians and hip-hop artists and other creative people for over twenty-five years. He started with a college radio show and he just kept going. His show, The Sound of Young America, got picked up by public radio stations, and he eventually changed the name to Bullseye, probably because he was no longer quite so young.  One of the effects of having started a radio...

Rania Matar’s photography is shaped by Lebanon’s history; Common Ground Films makes movies that are hard to fund; and old Atari games turn up in a landfill.

Rania Matar has been photographing women and girls for most of her career. It started with images of her children and expanded into an artistic practice that includes women from Lebanon, her home country, and women in the United States where she has lived since the 1980s. After 9/11, she wanted to express the shared humanity of people from both cultures, in a tangible way, through her photographs....

Bloomington filmmakers Kevin Weaver and Mitch Hannon ran into an issue when pitching their newest documentary, Beyond Vision , about blind kayaker and adventurer Lonnie Bedwell: it wasn't commercial enough. That's why the two of them, along with other local filmmakers, created Common Ground Films, a nonprofit organization centered around telling the stories of individuals who otherwise would not h...

In 2014 a documentary crew, an academic, and some gaming legends unearthed video game history from a landfill. Actually, it was probably a mix of archeologists and backhoe operators that did the unearthing, but they were all there in Alamogordo New Mexico to find a treasure trove of Atari ephemera. Writer and educator Raiford Guins tells us the story of how a ton of gaming cartridges from the earl...

Gabriel Jenks has a new album out. It’s called Lonesome, and it’s a collection of songs in folk and bluegrass traditions. It’s a bit of a departure. Jenks is an associate professor of music composition at the Jacobs School of Music, and the project he did before Lonesome involved writing counterpoint to understand 16th century polyphony while also deconstructing music theory writing from various p...

Gabriel Jenks has a new album out. It’s called Lonesome , and it’s a collection of songs in folk and bluegrass traditions. It’s a bit of a departure. Jenks is an associate professor of music composition at the Jacobs School of Music, and the project he did before Lonesome involved composing from historically stylistic standpoints as part of a multifaceted project titled A Journey Through the Under...

In the studio art department at Indiana University, 13 graduate students are preparing for their thesis shows. They have worked for 3 years exploring and mastering their crafts. This show is a cumulation of the effort and time they have put into their degree. Each artist has a concentration in a specific medium – ceramics, painting, sculpture, digital art, graphic design, metal, and photography. D...

Bloomington Fine Art supply is much more than an art supply shop. They host regular workshops with skilled artisans in the community teaching book binding, drawing, painting and so much more. They also host Art in Commons on Thursday evenings—free drop-in programs such as Zine Club, Collage Collective and meetings of the Indiana Gourd Society. Kayte spoke with BFA Supply owner Heather Farmer and Z...

High school theatre director challenges students (and audiences). Art is everywhere, according to Nice Work host Tyler Lake who cannot help but dwell on the materials, forms, and graphic treatments of the endless supply of consumer products that surround us all. Clothes, furniture, transportation, even the mundane like packaged food and cleaning supplies all come uncomfortably wrapped up inside of...

Bloomington has plenty of visual and studio art that will get you thinking, from the I Fell downtown to the Eskenazi and Grunwald galleries on campus. There’s also music that pushes boundaries, from the Back Door and the Blockhouse to the Jacobs’ New Music Ensemble.  We’ve encountered less thought-provoking theatre – although not none. The Jewish Theatre of Bloomington’s production 4000 Miles , fr...

On a weekend afternoon in late winter, the hosts of Nice Work decided to go to the Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum in Greene County. It’s been on our list of culturally interesting spots in Southern Indiana that we want to do stories about.   The trip didn’t quite turn out as we planned. But it did get us thinking about how we spend our time.