Roborant Review

Hugh Leeman

Art, museums, and culture in a time of profound social change

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S1 · E41
Today · 56 min
Suzanne Lacy on Art, Aging, and Accountability
At 80, one of the founders of socially engaged art climbed back into a dragster — as Cinderella — fifty years after she first did it. Why? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Suzanne Lacy — a pioneering figure in performance and social practice art whose work has been shown at Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and around the world — for a remarkably candid conversation about aging, accountability, and what art can and cannot change. Lacy revisits her 1976 performance Cinderella in a Speeding Dragster and its new incarnation, Cinderella Redux, using them as a lens on artistic longevity, the compulsion to keep moving, and a lifelong awareness of mortality. She walks through De tu Puño y Letra, the extraordinary Ecuador project in which 300 men stepped into a bullring — a space of masculinity and domination — to read aloud women's letters describing violence and femicide, then carried those letters, candle in hand, into the crowd. She reflects on We Are Here, her Lancashire mill project about two communities divided by a railroad track and joined only by a shared industrial past. Most striking is her honesty about her own position: what it means to work across race and class as a white, working-class woman; the friends who publicly humiliated and generously taught her; and why she believes accountability begins with the willingness to be wrong. She closes with a clear-eyed critique of an art education system that pays lip service to social practice while funneling everyone toward the market — and a defense of art made because you believe in it, not because you think it will save the world.
S1 · E41
Thursday · 58 min
Suzanne Lacy, Art, Aging, and Accountability
At 80, one of the founders of socially engaged art climbed back into a dragster — as Cinderella — fifty years after she first did it. Why? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Suzanne Lacy — a pioneering figure in performance and social practice art whose work has been shown at Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and around the world — for a remarkably candid conversation about aging, accountability, and what art can and cannot change. Lacy revisits her 1976 performance Cinderella in a Speeding Dragster and its new incarnation, Cinderella Redux, using them as a lens on artistic longevity, the compulsion to keep moving, and a lifelong awareness of mortality. She walks through De tu Puño y Letra, the extraordinary Ecuador project in which 300 men stepped into a bullring — a space of masculinity and domination — to read aloud women's letters describing violence and femicide, then carried those letters, candle in hand, into the crowd. She reflects on We Are Here, her Lancashire mill project about two communities divided by a railroad track and joined only by a shared industrial past. Most striking is her honesty about her own position: what it means to work across race and class as a white, working-class woman; the friends who publicly humiliated and generously taught her; and why she believes accountability begins with the willingness to be wrong. She closes with a clear-eyed critique of an art education system that pays lip service to social practice while funneling everyone toward the market — and a defense of art made because you believe in it, not because you think it will save the world.
S1 · E40
August 21 · 54 min
Caledonia Curry (Swoon) on Art, Trauma, and Healing
What if the most powerful thing art can do isn't hang on a museum wall, but sit two people down to draw a bird together — and quietly open a door to healing? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Caledonia Curry — the artist widely known as Swoon, a pioneer of street art whose portraits have appeared everywhere from Manhattan to the West Bank to the Venice Biennale — for a profoundly honest conversation about trauma, addiction, chronic pain, and the alchemy of turning buried pain into art. Curry traces her path from printing fragile portraits on newsprint and watching them decay, to the mobile American-stories truck of The House Our Families Built, to her deeply personal work in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood — the largest open-air drug market on the Eastern Seaboard — where her own family's history of addiction gave her a rare foothold of compassion. She unpacks the "third thing" that makes making art together a precursor to healing, why the opposite of addiction is connection, and how a character named Strawberry Shortcake once let her say what she couldn't say as herself. She speaks with striking vulnerability about losing her mother, learning to tell her own story on stage despite panic attacks, and moving from asking "why the addiction" to "why the pain." And she shares the remarkable account of healing years of chronic pain through the work of Dr. John Sarno — slowly, slowly, and then all at once. She closes with a deceptively simple call to action: do one thing badly. Follow your bliss. Unkink the hose.
S1 · E39
August 14 · 52 min
Cannupa Hanska Luger, A Field Manual for the Future
What do you do when your own success prices your community out of your work? And what happens when a Vietnam-era Army survival manual — built quietly on stolen Indigenous knowledge — lands in the hands of the artist whose ancestors that knowledge was taken from? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Cannupa Hanska Luger — the acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation — for a conversation about survival, storytelling, and the permeability of time. Luger's new PEN-recognized book, Surviva, began as a government-issue field manual his wife found in an Army surplus store — one issued to soldiers during the Vietnam War, the same era his father served. By redacting and illustrating over its pages, Luger transformed it into an artifact from the future, a catalog of his practice Future Ancestral Technologies. Luger traces the twin inspirations behind the book: a cattle-rancher father whose war lives in silence, and a Native artist mother who raised five kids on an art career and became, in his words, his real "field manual" for survival. He reflects on imposter syndrome and why he calls himself a maker of make-believe, on fatherhood and the idea that a relationship isn't a thing but a process, and on his grandfather — a self-taught orator and tribal councilman who lobbied Washington as a dam flooded 42% of their reservation. And he unpacks New Myth, asking who the monsters of our age really are — extractive industry, media, corporate greed, the manufacture of panic — and why the answer to slaying them is simpler, and harder, than any hero's tale.
S1 · E38
August 6 · 50 min
Noah Charney on AI art authentication and 85.7% Caravaggio
Can an algorithm tell you whether a painting is a real Caravaggio — and should we let it? And what happens when a performance artist steals Hitler's favorite painting and hangs it in an immigrant family's kitchen? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Noah Charney — art crime historian, founder of ARCA (the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art), TED speaker, and author of dozens of books including The Art of Forgery and The Museum of Lost Art — for a wide-ranging conversation about theft, forgery, lost masterpieces, and the artificial intelligence now quietly reshaping how the art world decides what's real. Charney tells the extraordinary story of the artist Ulay, who in 1976 stole Carl Spitzweg's The Poor Poet from a Berlin museum as a political "aktion" — with Marina Abramović photographing and a getaway van idling in the snow — and how Charney came to record ten hours of interviews with Ulay in the final year of his life. He explains why two-thirds of all old master works may be lost to history, and why the ones we can visit aren't necessarily the ones that mattered most. Then he unpacks the "fourth pillar" of art authentication: AI image analysis. Using the real case of a $71,000 "follower of Caravaggio" painting that an algorithm flagged as the genuine article, Charney walks through how a closed, purpose-built AI is trained on a catalogue raisonné, fed forgeries and synthetic fakes to learn what not to be fooled by, and used as a tiebreaker when equally decorated scholars refuse to agree. He makes the case against the all-powerful single connoisseur — from Bernard Berenson's sales commissions to the Wacker Van Gogh forgery trial — and teases a coming "demotion" of a famous painting that he predicts will make headlines around the world.
S1 · E37
August 1 · 55 min
FBI Special Agent and Art Crime Founder Robert Wittman on Stolen Art, Lies, and the Gardner Heist
He spent two decades pretending to be someone he wasn't — and recovered over $300 million in stolen art doing it. In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Robert Wittman, the founder of the FBI's Art Crime Team and the author of the bestselling memoir Priceless, for a riveting conversation about the psychology of going undercover, the art market's underworld, and what it costs to live a lie for a living. Working under the alter ego "Bob Clay," Wittman infiltrated criminal networks from Miami to Madrid to Paris, recovering Rembrandts, Goyas, Picassos, a $35 million Rembrandt self-portrait, an ancient Moche backflap said to be cursed, and Geronimo's eagle-feather war bonnet. He explains the tradecraft of ingratiation and mirroring, why the best weapon in any deal is a good mind, and the night he sat across from Corsican mobsters who'd put out a hit on him — with a gun in his pocket and a plan to talk his way out. Wittman also opens up about the car accident and wrongful DWI indictment that nearly ended his career and instead became its turning point, the wife who anchored him through it all, and the strange emotional toll of befriending people for months only to turn them in. He breaks down how stolen art is really used to launder money through free ports, why the Salvator Mundi never rang true to him, why criminals keep stealing art they can't sell, and how a set of screws in a picture frame helped him authenticate a stolen masterpiece. He closes on the one that got away — the still-unsolved Isabella Stewart Gardner heist — and the $10 million reward still waiting.
S1 · E36
July 26 · 1 hr 9 min
Juana Alicia on Murals, Memory, and Who Gets to Be a Hero
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.
#36
July 18 · 57 min
Michelle Grabner on Unromantic Truth and the Art School Crisis
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.
S1 · E35
July 12 · 56 min
The Beating Heart Is Bohemian: Oscar Villalon on ZYZZYVA and San Francisco
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.
S1 · E34
July 5 · 1 hr 4 min
Enrique Chagoya on invisible censorship, keeping our humanity, and uselessness
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.
S1 · E33
June 29 · 39 min
Christy Chan in conversation with Hugh Leeman
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?
S1 · E32
June 21 · 1 hr
Andy Rappaport on Art, AI, and the Future of San Francisco
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.
S1 · E31
June 15 · 1 hr 4 min
Faig Ahmed: The Venice Biennale, Quantum Physics, and Cultural Healing
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.
S1 · E30
June 9 · 1 hr 6 min
Dave Eggers on Contrapposto, Art School, and Creativity in the Age of AI
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.
S1 · E29
June 2 · 1 hr 25 min
Peter Coyote’s Life of Art, Activism, and Awakening
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.
S1 · E28
May 26 · 51 min
Xavier Robles de Medina on Post-Colonial Memory and The Constructed Image.
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.
S1 · E27
May 21 · 38 min
Stephanie Dinkins on AI, Community Memory, and Data as Care
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.
S1 · E26
May 19 · 40 min
Kevin Ivester on Contemporary Art in Austin and the Fight for Funding
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.
S1 · E25
May 14 · 1 hr 18 min
Arthur Gonzalez on Surfing Rejection, the Rat Fink, and Magic Realism
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?
S1 · E24
May 12 · 45 min
Mario Laplante: The Unembarrassed Truth: Faith, Identity, and Art That Confronts
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.

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