Roborant Review

<p><strong><em>Recorded with a live audience at Pier 70's 3rd Street Creative Artery.</em></strong></p><p>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 myth of trickle-down cultural investment, and shares what happened when Mayor Daniel Lurie called him out of the blue after a Chronicle op-ed ignited the city. With 32 years running Gallery Sixteen, Williams offers a clear-eyed view of what's been lost, what still survives, and what it actually takes to build a creative community from the ground up — permits or no permits.</p>

<p>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 heartbreak and hustle of acquiring his most prized drawing, and why he's now selling the collection he spent a lifetime building. But Johnson doesn't stop there. He takes sharp aim at museums cannibalizing their own legacies — from the Phillips Collection selling a Seurat masterwork to fund video art, to the Pennsylvania Academy parting with their only great Edward Hopper — arguing that trustees who treat permanent collections as casino chips are violating an unspoken Hippocratic oath. Equal parts memoir, manifesto, and love letter to the human condition in art, this conversation is essential listening for anyone who cares about what museums are for.</p>

<p>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 chapters an institution can face.</p>

<p>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 countdown, a one-way flight — that would end his life in Hong Kong for good.</p><p>In this episode, Justin speaks with Hugh Leeman about the collapse of Hong Kong's freedoms under the National Security Law, the slow erosion of artistic and academic space, and the surreal experience of losing two defining identities overnight. He reflects on Jimmy Lai — the Apple Daily founder now serving a twenty-year sentence — and the quiet daily ritual Wong created in his honor: drawing a single apple every day for twenty years as an act of remembrance.</p><p>They also discuss Wong's exhibition <em>Carry On</em>, the unexpected role of humor in the Hong Kong resistance movement, and what it means to carry a home that no longer exists in the form you remember. A conversation about art, memory, exile — and finding the lightness when the darkness doesn't lift.</p>

<p>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 <em>Hallucinations</em> and <em>Shock Treatment</em>, and the way low resolution imagery invites viewers into a more primal, meditative form of perception. The conversation also explores Campbell’s public work atop Salesforce Tower, his evolving thoughts on abstraction, and the importance of creating opportunities for emerging artists.</p><p></p>