Roborant Review

Katherine Sherwood is a painter, disability arts pioneer, and longtime UC Berkeley professor. Years before her 1997 cerebral hemorrhage, she was already painting the brain. In this Roborant Review conversation with Hugh Leeman, she goes from Catholic school and the saints to Buddhism and the Hopi “superior somebody.” She describes how Mike Henderson pushed her toward painting, and how she learned...

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 converte...

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 paste...

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 a...

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...

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 ar...

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 1...

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 cu...

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 bet...

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,...

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 ho...

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...

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 do...

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 l...

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...

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...

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, d...

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...