Nice Work

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 some form of art. Designers, often artists in their own right, cr...

Girls Rock Bloomington: how it started, how it’s going. How Voces Novae expands what choral music can be. And an R.E.M. cover band that’s better than a cover band.

This week on Nice Work we take a deep dive down the coin slot with author Raiford Guins and his new book about Pong, we check out an unconventional artist’s talk, and we preview the Bloomington International Film Festival just in time for this year’s screenings.  

Alice Wong, who passed away in November of 2025, was a writer, an editor, an organizer, a fan of nerd culture, a foodie, and a self-described disabled oracle.   She founded the Disability Visibility Project with StoryCorps to collect oral histories of disabled people and share them through tweets and podcasts and images and more. She was an advocate for disabled people throughout her life. Preside...

cross-genre artists Essence London about her new game Yet Another Lit Mag , we turn up the lights on the IU Library’s Moving Image Archive and hit the hard court to hear all about bike polo.  

Tyler Lake talks with Althea Crome about knitting tiny sweaters, tinier gloves, and only-slightly-larger sweaters for the 2009 film Coraline. Alicia Kozma gives us the who, what, when, and where of spring at the Cinema. Steve, of Steve’s Book-O-Rama, gives us his shop’s origin story. And Bethany Habegger reflects on nostalgia and painting objects as self-portraits. 

Carrie Hott likes to tinker. She takes apart electronics and tries to figure out how they work. She once did a residency at the UC Davis Center for Spaceflight Research. A recent project involves a pocket-sized, solar-powered internet server that hosts a website that she coded herself.   Researching Carrie Hott’s work got me wondering, what is it that artists do? How is their inquiry different fro...

On Nice Work, we take a second look at how we remember with poet Daniel Lassell and his new book of poetry, “Frame inside a Frame.” We go contra dancing with the Bloomington Old Time Music and Dance Group, paint a picture of artists Jack Owens, and preview an upcoming experimental music event called Overtuned Fest. 

The directors of a new documentary, WTO/99, on how they laid out a chronology of the events. Producer Mary Forrest asks an important question about love. It's time to start thinking about summer (arts!) camp. And Alex Chambers reviews Constellation’s new show, Séance: The Board Awakens. 

On Friday November 7, 2025, six student producers descended on a beloved local restaurant, mics in hand, to record a day in the life of the place. The fact that the Runcible Spoon would be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026 hadn’t occurred to the students in Alex Chambers’ podcasting class, but it was the locally beloved nature of the restaurant that brought them there.  Over the course of t...

This week on Nice Work, Bloomington journalist and author Steve Higgs tells the story of environmental activist Andy Mahler’s extraordinary life. We spin a yarn about White Violet Center for Eco-Justice in Terra Haute, and we hear from Gabriel Jenks and the New Music Ensemble. 

We celebrate two key figures from Indiana: screenwriter Angelo Pizzo, whose latest film is his most personal yet, and AIDS activist Ryan White, who will be memorialized by a new statue by sculptor Melanie Cooper Pennington.

When I invited Antonia Matthew for an interview on our show, she agreed but insisted that there were other local writers who were more deserving of the attention. Over the next couple of weeks, I received several messages from her with suggestions of writers we should interview. I was grateful and we’ll follow up on that, but I also think it says something about our guest today.  Tonia is original...

The eye-catching red abstract sculpture by artists Alexander Calder on the IU campus gets a brand-new coat of paint. We head downtown to experience authentic movement and the ideas behind a public performance called Ordinary Pilgrimage. Poet Divya Victor spins poetry out of the “noise” of official documents, and some Rubik's cubes get solved. 

We hear from a style icon about vintage style vs vintage values. The director of our local library reflects on libraries as public trusts. And the head of curatorial services at IU’s special collections library describes the similarities between a library and a seance.

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’s work “gamechanging.” Risk Work is about artists in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, who start...

This week Nice Work teams up with Bloomington’s own Busman’s Holiday to create something special. A variety show type special, featuring interviews with local artists and writers, a bit of comedy and some top tips for festive snacks. All that and a lot of great music from Busman's Holiday.

The IU Nutcracker’s makeover, why art scenes need city government, God on stage, and what to do in Bloomington in these last two weeks of the year.

There’s a podcast produced in Bloomington called It’s a Beautiful Day in the Gulch. The song “Gulch Brigade” is by Bloomington band Full Stride. The Nice Work team sent producer Karl Templeton to figure out why people call Bloomington “The Gulch.” The term goes back farther than we thought.  We learn where to get local art supplies - both new and repurposed - and how an art shop can build communit...

Alex Chambers visits the Terre Haute museum dedicated to labor leader Eugene Debs.   We head underground to a whole constellation of events at Orbit Room. And then it's a night at the movies with a one-of-a-kind screening at IU Cinema. Plus, Kayte and Tyler discuss their encounter with a pop-up local art show in an empty house. 

We ask professors and curators to talk about their work...while playing mini golf. Richard McCoy reflects on placemaking in Columbus. We see the world through the eyes of painter Wyatt LeGrand. And we finally taste Dubai chocolate. Credits This episode was produced and edited by Alex Chambers. We get production help from Danny William, Holly Wilkerson, Karl Templeton, Eddie Stewart, Leo Paes, Jill...

This week on Nice Work Curator Jennifer McComas grapples with American art and the Holocaust. We go inside The IFell, one of the best places to find art and artists in Bloomington. And we hit the court with Bloomington’s Bike Polo Club.

“They’re comedic, I remember showing my daughter one of those Blaxploitation films and we sat in front of the television and just laughed—because they were so silly.”  This week on Nice Work, Novotny Lawrence, director of the Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA) sits down with filmmaker Julie Dash to talk about the resurgence of Blaxploitation themes, and what it meant to be a part of the “LA Re...

Krista Detor’s performing career took off quickly. She’s a pianist, composer, and singer-songwriter, and she was playing big audiences almost before she knew it, touring in Europe and the U.S. Then, one night after a show, she was in her hotel room, putting a warm washcloth on her face, and she realized that for the entire tour, that was the moment she kept looking forward to. Being in the hotel r...

It turns out that when you design something to fit everyone, it doesn't really fit anyone. At least according to Kay Sargent. She serves as the Director of Thought Leadership, Interiors at the global design firm HOK . Maybe that seems obvious, but if you look around, you see a lot of things that seem designed without any single person in mind. The office is a great place to start. The same lightin...