Will Ryman: New York, New York

Widely recognized for his sculptures and public art installations, Will Ryman’s work is filled with an acute theatricality that harkens back to his early career as a playwright. The artist’s ongoing interest in literature, philosophy, and the Theatre of the Absurd manifests in his playful investigation of the folly of existence and our shared search for meaning and resolve. Material and subject are of equal importance for Ryman, whose work reveals his intuitive approach to sculpting diverse materials into expressive forms that examine essential aspects of the human experience. The artist’s prior museum exhibitions and public art installations include Will Ryman: La Villette, Parc de La Villette, Paris (2018), among others.

Eleanor Heartney has been writing about art since 1981. She is a longtime contributor to Art in America, Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and was honored in 2008 by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her most recent book is the co-authored Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.