Katherine Sherwood: When Life Caught Up to the Art
Katherine Sherwood is a painter, disability arts pioneer, and longtime UC Berkeley professor. Years before her 1997 cerebral hemorrhage, she was already painting the brain. In this Roborant Review conversation with Hugh Leeman, she goes from Catholic school and the saints to Buddhism and the Hopi “superior somebody.” She describes how Mike Henderson pushed her toward painting, and how she learned to laugh at a critic who called her canvases “the ugliest paintings I’ve ever reviewed.” She is candid about the harm of the “overcoming narrative” that followed her Wall Street Journal feature and Whitney Biennial appearance. She also talks about the healing seals of King Solomon, her Venuses of the Yelling Clinic, and the Yelling Clinic collective’s film responding to the Create exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, which many people now cite as the first museum intervention by disabled artists. She remembers Joan Brown’s last request to her, describes teaching Art, Medicine, and Disability, and explains why she hates the word “outsider.” The conversation looks hard at who gets celebrated, who gets erased, and what art history leaves out.
26 Oct 2026
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.
20 Oct 2026
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.
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