Roborant Review

Hugh Leeman
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Arts

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

  1. 6d ago

    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.

    Cannupa Hanska Luger, A Field Manual for the Future

  2. Aug 6

    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.

    Noah Charney on AI art authentication and 85.7% Caravaggio

  3. Aug 1

    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.

    FBI Special Agent and Art Crime Founder Robert Wittman on Stolen Art, Lies, and the Gardner Heist

  4. Jul 26

    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.

    Juana Alicia on Murals, Memory, and Who Gets to Be a Hero

  5. Jul 18

    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.

    Michelle Grabner on Unromantic Truth and the Art School Crisis

  6. Jul 12

    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.

    The Beating Heart Is Bohemian: Oscar Villalon on ZYZZYVA and San Francisco

  7. Jul 5

    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.

    Enrique Chagoya on invisible censorship, keeping our humanity, and uselessness

  8. Jun 29

    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?

    Christy Chan in conversation with Hugh Leeman
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Trailer

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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Hugh Leeman
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Hugh Leeman
  • Show Website
    Roborant Review

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