Michael Ryan is an artist from Chicago who is based in New York City and creates approximately life-size drawings, primarily in pencil, that are inspired by discarded, flea-market found photographs. Ryan’s muse is anonymity whose subjects become highlighted, but not known, as he culls through time-distant subject matter. In response to these disrupted and misplaced moments, the artist renders different tableaux in black and white, suggesting a search for these lost identities, while affirming one’s own.

Michael Ryan re-unites strangers of times past in compositions that range from 10-feet inheight to 14-feet in width. Brooklyn Institute of Fashion and Curatorial Studies (2012) is 10’ x 12’ and shows a group of suited men posing for an annual picture while Foundation for Life (2014) reflects a classroom interior, lined with wainscoting and replete with blackboards showing chalk-drawn lessons. Frances Farmer Sanitarium (2013) once again shows a group of men and women posing for representation, without knowing that their mark on posterity would have faded to this moment of reflection.

These signatures seen by Ryan are not lifted directly from photographs. Instead the artist has imagined the portraits, and details, visiting the process of memory through the hand-drawn representation, following extensive research regarding era and place. Girl with Note (2014) is 6-feet tall and appears timeless while the subject sits back into a chair within a private domestic interior.

Michael Ryan studied fine art at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. Since 2004 his drawings have appeared in several group shows throughout New York City. In 2012 the artist participated in Strange Glue that took place at the Thompson Gallery located in Weston, Massachusetts. In 2013 the Beird & Weil Galleries of Norton, Massachusetts included Ryan’s art in Wheaton Biennial. Michael Ryan’s monumental work has also received three solo shows beginning with Palimpsest, hosted by the Giacobetti Paul Gallery of Brooklyn, New York in 2011. In 2012 the gallery at Molloy College, located in Rockville, New York, presented Michael Ryan that appeared the following year at WanWan Lei Projects in New York City. In 2013 Michael Ryan was awarded a fellowship at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation.