Will Ryman

Will Ryman is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures and public art projects.

Early life and career Will Ryman was born on December 29, 1969, in New York City to the family of Robert Ryman.

In his early twenties, pursuing a career as a playwright, Ryman began taking playwriting workshops, and immersed himself in the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eugene Ionesco.

For twelve years, Ryman wrote his own plays while working a series of jobs as a script reader, a prep chef, and a line cook. Ryman created these sculptures out of a desire to "let the play's scenery tell the whole story, and to create theater with no lines or actors, but just the world itself."

A self-taught visual artist, Ryman made his earliest works from papier-mâché and combined household materials and everyday objects. As Ryman recounts, “I basically took apart my bookshelves and my coat tree and got some papier-mâché and built a hundred or so figures about four feet tall.” and in 2005 as part of “Greater New York” at P.S.1 in Long Island City, which helped launch his career as an artist.

Ryman developed an ambitious large-scale sculpture practice using materials as varied as coal, steel, computer parts, paper towels, bullets, and bronze.

Family Dinner, 2005, a sculpture of a domestic dinner scene exuding an unsettling tone, was shown at the Tracy Williams Ltd. Gallery, New York in 2005. This artwork was acquired by and exhibited in 2008 at the 21C Museum Collection, Louisville.

Park Avenue roses Organized by the Fund for Park Avenue Sculpture Committee and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, in 2011, Ryman’s public art project The Roses On Park Avenue, 2010, was unveiled on Park Avenue between 57th and 67th Streets in New York City. Ryman installed thirty-eight sculptures of roses towering as high as twenty-five feet and twenty individual scattered petals in the medians along Park Avenue. Climbing the thorny roses were sculptures of aphids, beetles, ladybugs, and ants made of fiberglass resin and stainless steel. The underlying concept for the installation was a critique of commercialism and an interrogation of our endless search for beauty and lasting perfection. New York Times critic Dorothy Spears wrote, “…in their cartoonish display of human expectation and failure, [The Roses] also owe a powerful debt to Mr. Ryman’s lingering fascination with absurdist theater.” the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton (2019).

In 2011, Ryman produced monochrome red, yellow, and blue versions of his large-scale Rose sculptures for the exhibition Will Ryman: Desublimation of the Rose at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables.

Other public art projects and exhibitions Presented by the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program and the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership, in 2013, Ryman’s Bird was installed in New York City’s Flatiron Square Plaza. Acquired by the Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Bird (2012), is a twelve-foot high, twelve-foot wide, and fourteen-foot long sculpture, made with over 5,000 actual and fabricated nails in the shape of a bird. The bird weighs five tons, and it stands on a nest of ninety thousand nails.

Also in 2013, Ryman produced America, a recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood log cabin, which examines the origins of capitalism and its complexities within the scope of American history. Assembled from real logs covered entirely in gold leaf, Ryman lined the interior walls and floor of the room-sized cabin with materials that had contributed to the development of America’s economy — including arrowheads, slavery shackles, bullets, pills, tobacco, and iPhones, arranged in grids. In 2015 the sculpture was exhibited in Anxious Spaces: Installation as Catalyst II, Knockdown Center, Queens NY and in 2017 at the CCS Galleries, College for Creative Studies, Detroit. Will Ryman’s life-size tableau made of fiberglass, wood, fabric, epoxy, coated with coal, is based on Pete Souza’s iconic photograph of President Obama, military officials, and members of the administration viewing in real time from the Situation Room of the West Wing, Osama bin Laden’s capture in Pakistan in 2011. Ryman deliberately reduced the dramatic narrative to its elemental parts. By covering the sculpted tableau in crushed coal - a polemical natural resource since The Industrial Revolution - Ryman alludes to the complicated consequences of human progress and to the eternal existence of war throughout history. The artist explains, “I erased a lot of the identity of the faces in that room, because for me, the interesting thing about the piece is the situation itself. It is one that has been repeating itself throughout history and will probably continue to repeat itself.” Surrounding the park’s Place de la Fontaine aux Lions, Ryman placed seven sulfur-yellow sculpted “heads” ranging in height from three to four meters. Sculpted in clay, cast in resin, and then painted, Will Ryman’s abstract forms were titled with lines from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 1948. Ryman’s Sisyphus, a four-meter tall dark bronze sculpture titled after Albert Camus’ absurdist narrative, was installed on the Prairie du Cercle Nord. Ryman’s Pac-Lab, a series of brightly colored walls and pathways designed to mimic a videogame maze in large-scale, which visitors could enter and navigate, was situated on the park’s Prairie du Cercle Nord. Pac-Lab was conceived as a monument suitable for our era, reflecting the constant choices and many paths we navigate daily - whether in a physical space or a virtual reality.

Personal life Will Ryman, the son of the artists Merrill Wagner and Robert Ryman (1930-2019), lives in New York City with his son, Aiden.