Roborant Review
Claim This Podcastby Hugh Leeman
Podcast Overview
<p><strong>Art, museums, and culture in a time of profound social change</strong></p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
3/4/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 29, 2026
Christy Chan in conversation with Hugh Leeman
<p>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 closing time, with viewers describing the visceral feeling of being the kid in the back seat of the car: powerless and powerful at once.</p><p>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?</p>
June 21, 2026
Andy Rappaport on Art, AI, and the Future of San Francisco
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
June 15, 2026
Faig Ahmed: The Venice Biennale, Quantum Physics, and Cultural Healing
<p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
34 total episodes available
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<p><strong>Art, museums, and culture in a time of profound social change</strong></p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
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