Roborant Review

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 ex...

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 seven cities in 2026, the film has drawn audiences to its post-screening Q&As long past...

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, includ...

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-Sovie...

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 wit...

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...

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 firs...

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...

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, corpo...

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...

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 obje...

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, an...

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, includ...

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 child...

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 thi...

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 exp...

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 su...

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...

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 heartbr...

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 cha...

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 c...

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 Hallucinatio...

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,...

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.