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Roborant Review

Roborant Review

by Hugh Leeman

Season 1

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.

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.

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?

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.

Faig Ahmed: The Venice Biennale, Quantum Physics, and Cultural Healing

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-Soviet society to the philosophy of Nasimi, from the hidden shame of inherited silence to the healing potential of contemporary art. Faig's work — known for its radical transformation of traditional Azerbaijani carpet forms into something that bends, dissolves, liquefies, and defies — is as philosophically layered as it is visually arresting. Faig opens up about growing up through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the identity vacuum it left behind, about the early years of his career when he had to communicate with women weavers through their brothers and husbands because cultural codes forbade direct contact, and about the village that agreed to collaborate with him only under the condition that they never be named.

Dave Eggers on Contrapposto, Art School, and Creativity in the Age of AI

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 with how America treats its artists. Dave traces the roots of Contrapposto back to his own early art education in the Chicagoland area, where he was a painting major before practicality intervened, and forward to his own practice of making art — drawings, paintings, prints — to fund ScholarMatch and the nonprofits at 849 Valencia. He talks about Cricket and Olympia, the novel's two protagonists, and the feral self-reliance of 70s and 80s kids who grew up free-range by default. He dissects the cannibalistic culture of art school MFA programs, explains why he believes the apprenticeship model should replace the $100,000-a-year degree, and introduces Art and Water — his new Pier 29 art school built on the idea that master artists and students should share space without money being exchanged. He also calls ChatGPT a hundred percent plagiarism, explains why letting AI write for you means leaving the human race, shares why he hasn't had a smartphone in years, and reflects on how The Circle — which predicted surveillance capitalism, corporate overreach, and the erosion of democracy — got it mostly right and somehow still underestimated things.

Peter Coyote’s Life of Art, Activism, and Awakening

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 power. He recounts the peyote experience that led Robert Peter Cohan to become Peter Coyote, his years with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, and the radical experiments in free food, free stores, communal life, and antiwar organizing that defined the counterculture. The interview moves through his acting and writing career, his work with Ken Burns, and his belief that storytelling can reach beyond ideology when it refuses simplification. Coyote also discusses toxic masculinity, Gary Snyder, Zen practice, nonviolent protest, corporate power, and the political lessons he draws from Vietnam, Trump-era authoritarianism, and the failures of the left. The result is a candid portrait of an artist-activist still asking how to live truthfully, resist domination, and act with discipline in dangerous times while honoring humility, restraint, and the fragile work of building democratic trust together today, now.

Xavier Robles de Medina on Post-Colonial Memory and The Constructed Image.

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 first real crash course in the commercial art world. He talks about what it meant to grow up in a post-colonial education system that never taught him the Dutch national anthem, and what it revealed when he moved to the Netherlands and found that his peers knew almost nothing about Suriname. He opens up about publishing his book Pengel, co-authored with his grandmother, to bring his grandfather's obscure international legacy into the light. And he digs into the works that have defined his recent practice: the Mangione portraits — those matter-of-fact colored pencil renderings of a face everyone has seen and no one knows — and the painting of the last U.S. soldier leaving Afghanistan, perfectly centered in a night-vision frame. These are meditations on what it means to see someone, to idolize someone, and to let an image carry the full weight of a historical moment.

Stephanie Dinkins on AI, Community Memory, and Data as Care

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 a model of community-building to her AI literacy work, her family-based project Not the Only Ones, and her exhibition Data Trust at ICA San José. Dinkins considers what it means to create technologies rooted in care, how Black and brown communities can challenge algorithmic bias, and why storytelling remains one of humanity’s most powerful tools for survival, recognition, and transformation.

Kevin Ivester on Contemporary Art in Austin and the Fight for Funding

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, corporate responsibility, and the choice to serve other people’s stories over his own artistic ambitions. Kevin traces his path from art school in Massachusetts to an impulsive road trip that unexpectedly ended in Austin, where he built one of the city’s key emerging galleries. He reflects on the great-grandfather who inspired the gallery’s name — a Jewish shipping magnate whose assets were seized in Nazi Germany — and how that history shaped his belief in service and community. Kevin also discusses the politics of arts funding, the founding of Friends Fair, and the challenge of building collector culture in a city of transplants. This is a conversation about art, access, money, and the radical possibility of genuine connection.

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