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.
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.”[2] These small expressive sculptures with outstretched arms and wailing mouths evolved into an artwork Ryman titled “The Pit,” which was shown in his first gallery exhibition in 2004 at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert in Chelsea,[4] 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.
The artist produced a sculptural tableau of a typical New York street scene consisting of fifteen characters including businessmen in suits, people waiting for a bus, a man eating a hot dog, and a woman reading a newspaper.
[17] 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.
[18] 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.
[19] 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.
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.
[21] Ryman’s Sisyphus, a four-meter tall dark bronze sculpture titled after Albert Camus’ absurdist narrative, was installed on the Prairie du Cercle Nord.
[22] 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.