Ryder Ripps

Life and Work

Ripps' was born in New York to designer Helene Verin and painter Rodney Ripps. He graduated from a New Media program at The New School in 2008.

Ripps' work has been included in many group shows at venues such as MoMA PS1, Eyebeam, Carroll/Fletcher, and the Royal College of Art. He has lectured at Rhizome, ForYourArt and Sotheby's. Ripps is the creator of several websites, including Internet Archeology, Dump.fm, and VFiles.

Ripps' first solo exhibition in January 2015 at Postmasters Gallery in New York City, titled "HO". featured large-scale oil paintings, portraits derived from the Instagram account of model Adrianne Ho. "Rips transformed self-portraits she posted online into expressive, highly distorted pictures.

Ripps had a solo exhibition at Red Bull Studios in February 2015.

In 2016, New media artist Matt Starr organized a Bernie Sanders-themed art exhibition "Weekend with Bernie" for Wayfarers Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition featured Ripps's installation art "Faces of Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash" which included Skype video chats with members of the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash. The exhibition raised over $10,000 dollars in donations to the Sanders presidential campaign.

Views and Controversies

Ripps' deliberately provocative projects and public comments have often faced criticism for being misogynist and/or racist.

In 2015, Ripps invited sex workers or ‘sensual masseurs’ to the Ace Hotel in Chelsea, where he then asked them to draw and paid them $80 for a 45-minute session. The Ace had offered to put Ripps up in the hotel for a night and given him a $50 fee as part of a rotating artist residency program. Ripps posted images of these sex workers and an artist statement, claiming that their sexual exploitation was symbolic of his own, considering himself underpaid by the Ace. This project, titled ‘Art Whore’, lost Ripps much public support, but gained him incalculable attention from the press. Art organization Rhizome, that had previously supported Ripps' work, publicly distanced itself from Ripps, calling his newest work "unthinking, unethical, and dull". Gawker ran the headline "Artist's Scummy Escort Exploitation Turns Art World Against Him." And Dazed Digital wrote "It's the same old story: a white dude co-opting someone else's labor in his struggle to Make A Point." The project was defended in Vice.In responses to accusations of exploitation Ripps commented "How is it exploitative? I paid her to draw stuff. Ace Hotel not paying me to make shit is more of an exploitation" and "I choose sex workers because great art is like great sex.” On the day of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, in a tweet since deleted, Ripps suggested that his critics were akin to the radical terrorist group Al Qaeda.

Ripps again faced accusations of exploitative misogyny after creating an entire exhibition of distorted Instagram images of sportswear model Adrienne Ho titled Ho. Paddy Johnson writes "the Ripps brand... has never been defined by thoughtfulness, but rather careless courage. And where this bravado has paid off in the past... its success is less absolute in Ho.”

In 2014 Ripps tweeted "as a strait white man.. i deserve all the ridicule..but as a jew i ask everyone take back what they said.. my people have been threw enough." and in 2016 "i wonder why @rhizome has never done a profile on me? could it be because im jewish?" In a 2017 interview with i-D Ripps stated "I think if I was transgendered or black, people wouldn’t give me as hard of a time. Jews have never been in favour, so nothing is new there."

In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist marches, Ripps compared the removal of Confederate monuments to the destruction of neo-Assyrian statues by ISIS, adding that the South is "not just about slavery."