Roborant Review

Hugh Leeman
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Arts

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

  1. 3d ago

    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.

    Susan Cervantes: The Precita Eyes Way

  2. Oct 20

    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.

    Robert Flynn Johnson: Make People Dream Your Dreams

  3. Oct 11

    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.

    Ben Davis: The City of Awe

  4. Oct 5

    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.

    Robert Flynn Johnson, Below the Radar: How a Curator Built a World-Class Collection

  5. Sep 27

    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.

    A Conversation with Jacqueline Francis and Trina Robinson, The 3.9 Art Collective

  6. Sep 19

    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.

    Dread Scott: To Propel History Forward

  7. Sep 11

    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.

    Beth Lipman on Glass, Abundance, and What We Leave Behind

  8. Sep 5

    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.

    Don't Gentrify the Image: Rick Lowe on Art, Data, and Community
See All (51)

Trailer

5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Hugh Leeman
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Hugh Leeman
  • Show Website
    Roborant Review

You Might Also Like