Roborant Review

What do you do when the man you painted thirty feet tall on the side of an elementary school turns out to have a history you can no longer celebrate?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with legendary Chicana muralist, educator, and activist Juana Alicia — co-creator of Maestrapeace, the iconic five-story mural on San Francisco's Women's Building, and one of the most consequential public artists of the last half century — for a sweeping conversation about collective authorship, cultural memory, gentrification, and the ethics of erasure.Juana Alicia traces her path from cutting paper dolls on the kitchen floor in Detroit, to the Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, to the picket lines of the United Farm Workers Union, where she says she received "the most foundational education I could have received." She talks about her artistic godmother, Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor, and about learning from members of Mexico's Taller de Gráfica Popular. She recounts painting a solidarity mural in Managua during the Contra War, and the arranged marriage of seven women artists who decided — without permission or budget — to paint an entire building.

Host Hugh Leeman sits down with Michelle Grabner — artist, curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, longtime professor and former chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — for one of the most candid conversations you'll hear about the current state of American art education.Grabner traces her path from a high school utility closet in Appleton, Wisconsin, where her teacher Mr. Perez had her paint an electrical switchboard hard-edge, to decades of building a practice inside what she calls the joyful constraints of raising three children. She talks about the strange, almost pathological freedom that arrived when her youngest left for college, and why she's begun thinking of her own relentless overproduction as a deliberate assault on the art world's fetish for rarity.She opens up about curating the last Whitney Biennial in the Breuer Building — the "layer cake" structure, why she asked every artist to interview someone else instead of accepting a curator's essay, and the one regret that still bothers her. She discusses her Artforum piece on FRONT and why regional triennials keep buckling. And she speaks with unusual frankness about the Trump administration's federal loan changes, the visa denials emptying her classrooms, the layoffs that are coming, and her frustration that her own institution is negotiating compliance rather than imagining an alternative.

What does a forty-year-old San Francisco literary journal have to teach us about loneliness, wealth, belonging, and how to survive an age of authoritarianism? A great deal, it turns out.In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Oscar Villalon — managing editor of ZYZZYVA, the acclaimed independent literary journal publishing West Coast writers and artists since 1985 — for a wide-ranging, deeply humane conversation about the purpose of literature in the 21st century, the displacement of the creative class from San Francisco, and why young people are quietly returning to print.Villalon traces ZYZZYVA's history and mission, explains why he imagines his ideal reader living in a rent-controlled apartment by choice, and makes the case that a literary journal exists to surface a community that's already there — not to manufacture one. He reflects on the border and the value placed on Mexican American futures, the bilingual prose that lets him write the way he actually thinks, and the false protection of wealth in a city blinded by its own gleam. And he closes with something quietly radical: the idea that meaning is found in service to others, that those children are your children too, and that literature's job is not to hand us answers but to give us the vocabulary to name where it hurts.

What happens to an artist — and to an entire creative ecosystem — when four major galleries close in a single month, when university endowments are taxed at twenty times the old rate, and when the art market itself becomes the most invisible form of censorship?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with acclaimed artist and longtime Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya — whose work has been exhibited in museums around the world, censored on two continents, and once destroyed with a crowbar — for a wide-ranging, unflinching conversation about the economics of art, the collapse of Bay Area art institutions, and why the humanities may be our only defense against an AI future.Chagoya traces the closing of Anglim Trimble Gallery and the "perfect storm" that has reshaped the art market since 2008. He reflects on his decision to retire from Stanford after thirty-one years, the layoffs and funding cuts reshaping academia, and the devastating closures of the San Francisco Art Institute and CCA. And he closes with something genuinely hopeful: a meditation on neuroplasticity, synesthesia, and why making art — useless, unsellable, joyful art — is one of the most human things we can do.

Christy Chan makes art that doesn't protect you. Her short film Somewhere to Be — set in the 1980s American South and told through the eyes of an eight-year-old daughter of immigrants — uses dark comedy and a child's gaze to ask what racism actually does to our humanity, not just our politics. Screening in 18 cities in 2026, the film has drawn audiences to its post-screening Q&As long past closing time, with viewers describing the visceral feeling of being the kid in the back seat of the car: powerless and powerful at once.In this conversation with Hugh Leeman, Christy traces the through-line connecting her film to her community-centered public art practice. She discusses Inside Out, the Richmond, California participatory installation where city officials banned community phrases critical of President Trump — a moment she describes as a signal of what was to come. She talks about founding Dear America in response to the 2021 anti-Asian hate epidemic, going from idea to launch in three weeks by bypassing the grant cycle entirely. And she reflects on Fainting Couch, her re-upholstered 1890s artifact that invites everyone to rest on what was once a symbol of exclusionary class privilege, and asks its central question: who gets to be fragile in America, and who has to be strong?

In this episode, Hugh Leeman speaks with Andy Rappaport, venture capitalist, musician, collector, artist, and co-founder of Minnesota Street Project. The conversation moves from the Venice Biennale to vintage guitars, from school shootings to refugee portraiture, from 9/11 memorials to the accelerating economic disruptions of AI.Rappaport discusses his collaborations with Deborah Oropallo, including works that use beauty, sound, and visual seduction to draw viewers toward painful subjects: gun violence, displacement, mass trauma, and the failures of political imagination. He also reflects on his family’s refugee history and how quickly a society’s moral assumptions can change from one generation to the next.The conversation then turns to San Francisco’s art ecosystem. Rappaport describes why he and Deborah Rappaport founded Minnesota Street Project, what gallery closures and art school losses reveal about the city’s cultural future, and why arts philanthropy must evolve beyond single-institution support.Finally, Rappaport connects his decades-old warnings about technology and inequality to today’s AI economy, arguing that society must find ways to move people “from one side of this chasm to the other” rather than leaving survival to luck.

What does a 14th-century Azerbaijani mystic poet have in common with quantum physics — and what does either of them have to do with a carpet?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with internationally acclaimed Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed, whose solo exhibition currently represents Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale, for a conversation that moves from the unspoken social codes of post-Soviet society to the philosophy of Nasimi, from the hidden shame of inherited silence to the healing potential of contemporary art. Faig's work — known for its radical transformation of traditional Azerbaijani carpet forms into something that bends, dissolves, liquefies, and defies — is as philosophically layered as it is visually arresting.Faig opens up about growing up through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the identity vacuum it left behind, about the early years of his career when he had to communicate with women weavers through their brothers and husbands because cultural codes forbade direct contact, and about the village that agreed to collaborate with him only under the condition that they never be named.

In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Dave Eggers — bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, and The Every, co-founder of 826 Valencia, and now the author of Contrapposto, a novel that pulls readers through every angle of the art world — for a conversation that is at once a deep literary discussion and a sweeping indictment of everything wrong with how America treats its artists.Dave traces the roots of Contrapposto back to his own early art education in the Chicagoland area, where he was a painting major before practicality intervened, and forward to his own practice of making art — drawings, paintings, prints — to fund ScholarMatch and the nonprofits at 849 Valencia. He talks about Cricket and Olympia, the novel's two protagonists, and the feral self-reliance of 70s and 80s kids who grew up free-range by default. He dissects the cannibalistic culture of art school MFA programs, explains why he believes the apprenticeship model should replace the $100,000-a-year degree, and introduces Art and Water — his new Pier 29 art school built on the idea that master artists and students should share space without money being exchanged.He also calls ChatGPT a hundred percent plagiarism, explains why letting AI write for you means leaving the human race, shares why he hasn't had a smartphone in years, and reflects on how The Circle — which predicted surveillance capitalism, corporate overreach, and the erosion of democracy — got it mostly right and somehow still underestimated things.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Hugh Leeman sits down with actor, writer, Zen priest, and activist Peter Coyote to trace a life shaped by outsiders, mentors, rebellion, and disciplined spiritual practice. Coyote reflects on his childhood in New York, the profound influence of Susie Nelson, and the early awareness of race, class, Jewish identity, and American hypocrisy that made him skeptical of power. He recounts the peyote experience that led Robert Peter Cohan to become Peter Coyote, his years with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, and the radical experiments in free food, free stores, communal life, and antiwar organizing that defined the counterculture. The interview moves through his acting and writing career, his work with Ken Burns, and his belief that storytelling can reach beyond ideology when it refuses simplification. Coyote also discusses toxic masculinity, Gary Snyder, Zen practice, nonviolent protest, corporate power, and the political lessons he draws from Vietnam, Trump-era authoritarianism, and the failures of the left. The result is a candid portrait of an artist-activist still asking how to live truthfully, resist domination, and act with discipline in dangerous times while honoring humility, restraint, and the fragile work of building democratic trust together today, now.

Xavier traces his path from growing up in independent Suriname surrounded by his grandfather's art books and the quiet legacy of a sculptor who built the country's most iconic public monument — including setting up a bronze foundry from scratch, without an income, with a budget barely sufficient for the task — to working as a studio assistant for Takashi Murakami in New York, where he got his first real crash course in the commercial art world. He talks about what it meant to grow up in a post-colonial education system that never taught him the Dutch national anthem, and what it revealed when he moved to the Netherlands and found that his peers knew almost nothing about Suriname. He opens up about publishing his book Pengel, co-authored with his grandmother, to bring his grandfather's obscure international legacy into the light.And he digs into the works that have defined his recent practice: the Mangione portraits — those matter-of-fact colored pencil renderings of a face everyone has seen and no one knows — and the painting of the last U.S. soldier leaving Afghanistan, perfectly centered in a night-vision frame. These are meditations on what it means to see someone, to idolize someone, and to let an image carry the full weight of a historical moment.

Transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins joins Hugh Leeman for a conversation about AI, equity, storytelling, and collective memory. Known for her work at the intersection of emerging technology and underrepresented communities, Dinkins discusses how personal and communal narratives can reshape the data systems that increasingly govern our lives.The conversation moves from her grandmother’s garden as a model of community-building to her AI literacy work, her family-based project Not the Only Ones, and her exhibition Data Trust at ICA San José. Dinkins considers what it means to create technologies rooted in care, how Black and brown communities can challenge algorithmic bias, and why storytelling remains one of humanity’s most powerful tools for survival, recognition, and transformation.

What does it take to build an art ecosystem from scratch in a city changing faster than anyone can track? And why does one gallerist believe Austin’s biggest tech companies owe its artists a debt they have yet to pay?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman speaks with Kevin Ivester, founder of Ivester Contemporary and chair of the Austin Art Agency (A3), about galleries, grant writing, art fairs, corporate responsibility, and the choice to serve other people’s stories over his own artistic ambitions.Kevin traces his path from art school in Massachusetts to an impulsive road trip that unexpectedly ended in Austin, where he built one of the city’s key emerging galleries. He reflects on the great-grandfather who inspired the gallery’s name — a Jewish shipping magnate whose assets were seized in Nazi Germany — and how that history shaped his belief in service and community.Kevin also discusses the politics of arts funding, the founding of Friends Fair, and the challenge of building collector culture in a city of transplants.This is a conversation about art, access, money, and the radical possibility of genuine connection.

In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with the Bay Area artist and educator for a wide-ranging conversation about creative identity, the art of handling rejection, and what it takes to build a life in art over four decades. Arthur traces his path from discovering lowbrow artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and Juxtapoz co-founder Robert Williams as an eleven-year-old in the streets of Sacramento, to abandoning photorealism, to fishing exploded ceramic shards out of a garbage bin and calling it sculpture — and finding, in that moment, exactly who he was as an artist.Arthur opens up about the six consecutive graduate school rejections that nearly derailed his career, how studying under legendary California artists Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, and Manuel Neri at UC Davis transformed his practice, and why he applied for the NEA Fellowship so many times that four of those applications said yes. He also reflects on magic realism as a creative framework, the original dark mythology of Pinocchio, the closing of CCA and SFAI and what it means for the future of arts education in the Bay Area, and why every artist — no matter how established — needs to keep asking: what am I making, and why?

Mario Laplante is a Quebec-born, San Francisco-based artist whose work has never been content to decorate walls. For three decades, he has used printmaking, ceramics, installation, and artist books to confront some of the most charged intersections of identity, faith, and culture: the gay experience, the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals, dual national identity, and the sacred weight of objects we no longer know what to do with.In this conversation with Hugh Leeman, Mario speaks with remarkable candor about growing up gay and Catholic in Montreal — and what it meant when his parents' faith collapsed overnight. He traces the origins of his landmark project Illuminae, in which he created three hundred ceramic priest figures in response to the Boston clergy abuse crisis, and explains his ongoing series of disc sculptures made from deconstructed Bibles — a practice born from bookbinding training, personal theology, and a willingness to hold contradiction without resolution.

In this episode, Hugh Leeman speaks with Hillary Olcott, curator of the Arts of the Americas at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, about the evolving role of museums in telling more inclusive, collaborative, and community-centered stories. Olcott discusses the reopening of the de Young Museum’s Arts of Indigenous Americas galleries, the importance of Indigenous curators, artists, advisors, and cultural leaders in shaping interpretation, and how museums can move beyond older boundaries between “fine art,” anthropology, and cultural heritage.This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in Indigenous art, museum ethics, curatorial practice, repatriation, visitor engagement, and the future of art museums.

In this episode, filmmaker Adam Leao discusses San Francisco Rising, his documentary now streaming on Apple TV. The film offers an intimate, street-level portrait of San Francisco in 2024, exploring the city’s beauty, contradictions, and resilience through the lives of artists, activists, public officials, and community members.Adam discusses some of the documentary’s most powerful scenes, including the scattering of unclaimed ashes under the Golden Gate Bridge, the fentanyl and opioid crisis in the Tenderloin, JJ Smith’s street-level documentation and community work, former Mayor London Breed’s reflections on the city, and photographer Jake Ricker’s years of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge. The episode also explores documentary filmmaking, trust-building, shooting on location, and how San Francisco continues to rise through crisis, creativity, and community.Watch San Francisco Rising, now streaming on Apple TV.Disclosure: Host Hugh Leeman appears briefly in San Francisco Rising as one of the documentary’s interview subjects. This episode is not a paid advertisement or sponsored placement; the conversation explores the film, its portrait of San Francisco, and the documentary process.

Interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer Nanci Amaka joins the podcast to discuss her powerful work exploring trauma, memory, migration, grief, motherhood, death, and ancestral healing. Through performance, photography, installation, and text, Amaka examines the body as a site of memory and art as a space for ritual, care, and transformation.In this conversation, Amaka reflects on her childhood in southeastern Nigeria, her migration to the United States, and major works including Cleanse, Ije | Ézè, Anarcha, and Corpse & Mirror. She discusses intergenerational trauma, the violent loss of her mother, the emotional force of performance art, and how confronting death can become a path toward presence, empathy, and renewal.

Renowned Bay Area artist Mildred Howard joins the podcast to discuss her five-decade career in public art, assemblage, installation, printmaking, collage, and multimedia sculpture. Born in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley, Howard reflects on growing up in a politically active Black family, the influence of her mother, Mabel Howard, and the role of art in preserving overlooked histories.In this conversation, Howard discusses Bay Area activism, gentrification, redlining, public monuments, Black history, travel, jazz, education, and her ongoing commitment to telling different stories through art. She also reflects on works and projects, including Collaborating with the Muses, Untold Histories and Hidden Truths, her public artworks, and her upcoming exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California.

This episode features a deeply personal and politically charged conversation with a celebrated Mexican-American artist whose work has been removed from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery under pressure from the Trump administration, labeled as "woke." Born in Reynosa, Mexico and raised in San Juan, Texas, our guest has spent decades using Baroque techniques to illuminate the immigrant experience — the violence, the hope, and the geopolitical forces that drive people to risk everything crossing a border. We explore the origins of his art, his mother's kitchen-table magic with a pencil, the harsh realities of the border crisis, the weaponization of the word "woke," and what censorship by one of America's most iconic cultural institutions means for art, truth, and democracy. A must-listen for anyone following the Trump administration's assault on cultural institutions — and for anyone who believes art should make us uncomfortable.

What is really happening to San Francisco’s arts ecosystem?In this episode, Hugh Leeman speaks with Maria Jenson, Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts, about the forces reshaping the city’s cultural landscape. Maria reflects on the fallout from the pandemic, the closure of major institutions, the restructuring of arts governance, and the growing urgency around advocacy, public voice, and sustainable funding.She also discusses the State of Emergency Summit, direct engagement with city leadership, the importance of protecting arts funding mechanisms like Prop E, and why artists themselves must be included in conversations about recovery. The result is a candid, timely conversation about power, policy, and what it would take to build a more open, accessible, and equitable cultural commons in San Francisco.

Recorded with a live audience at Pier 70's 3rd Street Creative Artery.San Francisco's art ecosystem is in freefall. CCA, SFAI, Mills College, and dozens of galleries have closed in rapid succession — and gallerist Griff Williams says we haven't even begun to feel the fallout. In this conversation with Hugh Leeman, Williams traces the collapse from the first dot-com bubble to today, confronts the myth of trickle-down cultural investment, and shares what happened when Mayor Daniel Lurie called him out of the blue after a Chronicle op-ed ignited the city. With 32 years running Gallery Sixteen, Williams offers a clear-eyed view of what's been lost, what still survives, and what it actually takes to build a creative community from the ground up — permits or no permits.

Robert Flynn Johnson spent 32 years building the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts into one of America's great print and drawing collections — all while quietly assembling a world-class private collection of Edgar Degas works on paper on a curator's salary. In this wide-ranging conversation, Johnson reflects on discovering Degas "below the radar" in 1976 for a few thousand dollars, the heartbreak and hustle of acquiring his most prized drawing, and why he's now selling the collection he spent a lifetime building. But Johnson doesn't stop there. He takes sharp aim at museums cannibalizing their own legacies — from the Phillips Collection selling a Seurat masterwork to fund video art, to the Pennsylvania Academy parting with their only great Edward Hopper — arguing that trustees who treat permanent collections as casino chips are violating an unspoken Hippocratic oath. Equal parts memoir, manifesto, and love letter to the human condition in art, this conversation is essential listening for anyone who cares about what museums are for.

Today's episode is with David C. Howse, the 10th and final president of the California College of the Arts. In our conversation, we talk about his journey from operatic singer to cultural leader, the herculean effort to preserve CCA's 120-year legacy amid the broader crisis facing arts education, and what it means to lead with vulnerability, purpose, and grace through one of the most difficult chapters an institution can face.

Justin Wong spent nearly two decades as one of Hong Kong's most recognized political cartoonists, drawing a daily column for Ming Pao newspaper while teaching comics and illustration at Hong Kong Baptist University. Then, in 2021, a five-hundred-word academic article he'd written about protest imagery triggered a sequence of events — a university administration that called the police, a four-day countdown, a one-way flight — that would end his life in Hong Kong for good.In this episode, Justin speaks with Hugh Leeman about the collapse of Hong Kong's freedoms under the National Security Law, the slow erosion of artistic and academic space, and the surreal experience of losing two defining identities overnight. He reflects on Jimmy Lai — the Apple Daily founder now serving a twenty-year sentence — and the quiet daily ritual Wong created in his honor: drawing a single apple every day for twenty years as an act of remembrance.They also discuss Wong's exhibition Carry On, the unexpected role of humor in the Hong Kong resistance movement, and what it means to carry a home that no longer exists in the form you remember. A conversation about art, memory, exile — and finding the lightness when the darkness doesn't lift.

In this episode, artist Jim Campbell speaks with Hugh Leeman about the experiences that shaped his life and work from growing up around electronics in Chicago and struggling through MIT, to making deeply personal art rooted in family history, memory, disability, and grief. Campbell reflects on the early Tenderloin exhibition that changed his career, the emotional origins of works like Hallucinations and Shock Treatment, and the way low resolution imagery invites viewers into a more primal, meditative form of perception. The conversation also explores Campbell’s public work atop Salesforce Tower, his evolving thoughts on abstraction, and the importance of creating opportunities for emerging artists.

Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg discuss their decades-long creative partnership, the role of humor and questioning in their work, and the ideas behind their exhibition Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time & Technology. The conversation moves through Jewish thought, feminism, robotics, ecology, family life, screen-free Shabbat, and the ways art can reframe our relationship to time, nature, and technology. Together, Shlain and Goldberg reflect on collaboration, creativity, and why the human experience matters even more in the age of AI.

Artist, licensed psychoanalyst, and new media pioneer Ken Feingold has explored fascinating concepts on the potential impact of AI on society for decades through his exhibitions from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Center Pompidou and beyond.

Beau Stanton traces his rise from a Craigslist apprenticeship with Ron English during the housing crisis to murals spanning Times Square and small-town America. He reflects on the tension between public art, revitalization, and gentrification, and on the controversy that nearly ended his career before Shepard Fairey and the Kennedy family came to his defense.

Authors Chris Feliciano Arnold (The Third Bank of the River) and Ingrid Rojas Contreras (The Man Who Could Move Clouds) share on dreaming in fiction to fighting with an AI boyfriend, from the vanishing Amazon to the vanishing liberal arts, this episode is a call to action for anyone who has ever felt the pull of a story they needed to tell.

Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, discusses the movement’s visual strategy, the impact of FBI surveillance, and the enduring power of political art. This conversation explores race, activism, media, and the role of images in times of social upheaval.

Today's episode is with art gallery owner Jack Fischer. In our conversation, we talk about the shrinking collector base, the decision to close his gallery after decades of showing art that leaves behind the raw emotion of the artist's hand, and the changing times of society amidst a very uncertain future of the arts and humanities.

Artist and educator Nigel Poor discusses teaching photography at San Quentin, co-creating Ear Hustle, and the role of storytelling in humanizing incarceration. We talk about memory, empathy, creative practice, and how art can reveal forms of everyday life that are often ignored or misunderstood.

A podcast about art and culture in a time of profound social change: listen to conversations with artists, museum curators, and cultural thinkers on controversy, censorship, migration, incarceration, and the future of our institutions. Follow the show to hear the full season.

Artist Javier Salazar Rojas, also known as The Deported Artist, reflects on life after deportation from the United States and the role of art in rebuilding community. We discuss incarceration, forced displacement, and how collective art-making can create dignity, healing, and connection beyond the commercial art world.

Crocker Art Museum curators Francesca Wilmott and Sara Morris discuss Making Moves, collaboration across museum departments, and feminist approaches to curating. The conversation explores how museums can break down hierarchies between art and craft, rethink art history, and become more responsive civic spaces.

Zapotec artist and weaver Porfirio Gutierrez discusses ancestral weaving traditions, natural pigments, migration, and the meaning of cultural return. We also examine why the Western category of “art” does not neatly fit Zapotec knowledge systems, and how museums have historically separated textiles from fine art.

Artist Kota Ezawa reflects on the ideas behind work shown at the Whitney Biennial, SFMOMA, and other major institutions. We discuss his labor-intensive process, his use of reduced imagery and watercolor animation, and how he thinks about making art in a world saturated by images.

Curator Abby Chen discusses the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the geopolitical tensions surrounding Taiwan and China, and what museums can become in a moment of rapid social change. We also talk about colonial collections, institutional power, and whether museums can resist becoming just another part of the attention economy.