Roborant Review

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.