Roborant Review

Hugh Leeman

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

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S1 · E49
Monday · 59 min
Susan Cervantes: The Precita Eyes Way
Susan Cervantes is the founder of Precita Eyes Muralists, the San Francisco organization that has guided community mural-making for nearly fifty years. In this Roborant Review conversation, she traces her life from leaving Dallas at sixteen on an art scholarship, to meeting her husband and lifelong collaborator Luis Cervantes at the California School of Fine Arts, to raising a family in a converted Precita Park storefront. She recalls watching the Mujeres Muralistas paint the Mission’s walls and learning the collaborative method that became “the Precita Eyes way.” She speaks candidly with Hugh Leeman about eviction and displacement after Luis’s death, about the McDonald’s commission that unexpectedly saved Precita Eyes’ building, and about carrying the community mural process to Russia and China. Along the way she reflects on whether an artist should take a side, how murals surface both struggle and hope, and what the next generation should keep as new tools — from spray paint to AI — reshape the form. A moving portrait of a life built on collaboration, inclusion, and the belief that making art together makes better human beings.
S1 · E48
October 20 · 1 hr 5 min
Robert Flynn Johnson: Make People Dream Your Dreams
In Part Two of Roborant Review’s series with Robert Flynn Johnson — former curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, who acquired some twenty thousand works for the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor — Hugh Leeman draws out eight more acquisitions and the stories behind them. A Prendergast monotype that walked in off the street on “Expertizing Day”; a Degas bathing pastel bought at a sleepy morning auction for under a million; the most expensive American print ever sold at auction, a Mary Cassatt color etching; the only John Singer Sargent monotype in existence, mailed down from Reno by the granddaughter of actor Joseph Jefferson; a Toulouse-Lautrec circus drawing made as the artist’s ticket out of a sanitarium; an Edvard Munch color woodcut funded by an unexpected bequest; the under-the-radar Cyril Power linocuts that soared in value; and the Crown Point Press and Ed Ruscha archives, with Johnson’s ingenious “Achenbach proof” that keeps the collection forever current. A master class in connoisseurship, auction-house skepticism, and the private philanthropy that builds American museums.
S1 · E47
October 11 · 54 min
Ben Davis: The City of Awe
Ben Davis is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Illuminate, the nonprofit behind the Bay Lights, the Golden Mile in Golden Gate Park, and the Grace Cathedral light works. In this Roborant Review conversation, he makes the case for San Francisco as the “city of awe” — not the doom loop — and for beauty as a serious civic instrument. He and Hugh Leeman talk about why he’s turned down Dubai and Singapore to go deeper where he lives, the “impossible” engineering of putting lights on a vibrating bridge, how he converts rage into beauty, and the space between stimulus and response he calls the whole of free will. He traces his drive back to school desegregation in Boston, shares his 2028 fantasy to carry Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag as light to fifty cities worldwide, answers the criticism that his lasers harm migratory birds, and describes Grace Light — the Grace Cathedral installation that has become a portal for people confronting death.
S1 · E46
October 5 · 56 min
Robert Flynn Johnson, Below the Radar: How a Curator Built a World-Class Collection
For thirty-two years, Robert Flynn Johnson was curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — the largest print and drawing collection west of Chicago. In this Roborant Review conversation, he walks Hugh Leeman through eight works he acquired for the collection and the extraordinary stories behind each one: a Michelangelo working drawing he bought for seventy-five thousand dollars after the museum's own director turned it down; Rembrandt's only still life, an etching of a South Pacific shell; a drawing by a Rembrandt pupil that the master himself corrected; a vanitas-like gouache by the eighteenth-century Nuremberg artist Barbara Regina Dietzsch; a Hokusai brush drawing bought for thirteen thousand dollars; an undervalued Osaka School kabuki print acquired for about a hundred and twenty-five dollars; Alexander Gardner's eerily modern photograph of Lincoln conspirator Lewis Powell, once owned by Robert Mapplethorpe; and an Eadweard Muybridge album of 1870s San Francisco with a serendipitous twist. A master class in connoisseurship, the five criteria of museum collecting, and the art of the possible.
S1 · E45
September 27 · 51 min
A Conversation with Jacqueline Francis and Trina Robinson, The 3.9 Art Collective
The 3.9 Art Collective takes its name from a moment of civic anxiety — a census-year projection that Black residents might drop to just 3.9 percent of San Francisco. In this Roborant Review conversation, Hugh Leeman speaks with art historian, curator, and author Jacqueline Francis and research-based artist Trina Robinson about Black displacement in the Bay Area, the affordability crisis pushing artists out of the city, and the residencies and studio resources that too often go unadvertised. They discuss the collective's forthcoming data survey and Nexus Bay Area Black Art Week, Trina's archival films tracing her family's migration from Chicago to California and the story of her great-great-uncle William J. French, Jacqueline's curatorial work and her book Making Race, and what the closing of CCA means for the last art school in San Francisco. A wide-ranging talk on migration, memory, staying, and how a collective can do what an institution can't.
S1 · E44
September 19 · 54 min
Dread Scott: To Propel History Forward
Artist Dread Scott has spent nearly four decades making what he calls revolutionary art to propel history forward. In this Roborant Review conversation, he talks with Hugh Leeman about art's role in social movements, the value of the "professional troublemaker," and why capitalism — not the flag — is what he's really interrogating. He revisits What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, the 1988 installation that drew death threats and hasn't been shown in the U.S. in twenty years, and previews two new commissions for The Body Politic at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Defending the Flag, a live performance with a uniformed guard and a replica M4 carbine, and Life, Death, America, a fifteen-by-thirty-six-foot mural of graphite body prints. A frank exchange on courage, luck, fatherhood, and what art can still do in dark times.
S1 · E43
September 11 · 1 hr 9 min
Beth Lipman on Glass, Abundance, and What We Leave Behind
What can a table of glass fruit tell someone excavating our civilization a thousand years from now? And what happens to art — and to us — when the tangible world starts losing to the virtual one? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Beth Lipman — an acclaimed artist known for her monumental, often ghostly still lifes rendered in glass — for a wide-ranging conversation about material culture, memory, and what gets left behind. Lipman traces her path into the still life tradition "through the back door," from a childhood among craft fairs and folk-art books in Pennsylvania Dutch country to her first intentional engagement with the genre at the Brooklyn Museum. She explains why she deliberately keeps the smartphone — and any marker of new technology — out of her sculptures, and how her ethical restraint around cultural appropriation shapes what she will and won't put on the table. She reflects on the piece in the Jewish Museum's permanent collection that became unexpectedly autobiographical, her first permanent outdoor work Hive Mind at Iowa State, and the idea of anxiety, or "perseverating," as an artistic tool. The conversation opens into the biggest questions of the moment: the digital revolution's effect on human consciousness, the possibility of a coming backfire against AI and misinformation, the fragility of the systems we depend on, and why she believes making anything at all is a radical, political act. It closes on the double — two sides of the coin, truth and untruth — the theme she thinks may carry her work for years to come.
S1 · E42
September 5 · 1 hr 2 min
Don't Gentrify the Image: Rick Lowe on Art, Data, and Community
What does it mean to gentrify a painting? And can a Wall Street ticker be reprogrammed to broadcast Black progress instead of stock prices? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Rick Lowe — the MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, painter, and social sculptor who founded Project Row Houses in Houston's Third Ward — for a wide-ranging conversation about art, data, community, and the difference between empathy and empowerment. Lowe traces his own improbable path: from a sharecropping childhood in rural Alabama and a high school diploma he says was "basically just given," to a basketball scholarship, to the "easy" art class that redirected his entire life. He explains how a young person's question — why can't an artist create solutions? — set in motion a decades-long practice that turned twenty-two derelict shotgun houses into a landmark of socially engaged art, and why he insisted the housing be for young mothers in the neighborhood, not visiting artists. At the heart of the conversation is his current museum exhibition at the University of Michigan, built out of a multi-year residency inside the Institute for Social Research. Lowe unpacks the Black Wall Street Journey ticker, the "deficit model" that measures communities only in relation to others, and his conviction that data is a kind of sculpture — one that has shaped a distorted and illegitimate perception of Black life in America. Drawing on Joseph Beuys's idea of social sculpture, he makes the case that anything — politics, organizing, a game of dominoes — can be a work of art, and that real power is never given, only claimed.
S1 · E41
August 30 · 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
August 27 · 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.

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