Ryder Ripps

Ryder Ripps
Born	(1986-07-07) July 7, 1986 New York City, New York, United States
Education	Eugene Lang/New School, New York City, New York (Bachelor of Arts)
Known for	ECD at OKFocus
Notable work	OKFocus Art Whore Ho Barbara Lee
Style	Conceptual art Digital art
Website	ryder-ripps.com

Ryder Ripps (born July 7, 1986) is a conceptual artist and creative director living in New York City.

Working in Art, Music, Production, Graphic Design and Programming, Ripps is largely known for both the creative work produced by his design studio OKFocus, and independently for his controversial Artwork.

As Executive Director of OKFocus, Ripps has developed content for musicians Kanye West, Travis Scott, Grimes, Drake, Diplo, M.I.A., Bruno Mars, and Mike Will Made It; Fashion lines Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Kenzo, NICOPANDA, Been Trill, Stone Island and FUCT; and corporate brands Nike, Red Bull, Snapchat and Google. He is also responsible for branding and digital strategies behind 88Rising, Soylent, NUGGS, VFILES and Abacus Pills.

Creative Work

Ripps first received recognition very early in his career with digital-based projects such as dump.fm and Internet Archaeology.

In 2010 he collaborated with music artist M.I.A. on a series of websites. That same year he assisted Artist Ryan Trecartin with a project for W Magazine. In 2011 Ryder Ripps and Jonathan Vingiano founded OKFocus, a digital marketing and design studio. Within a year, OKFocus was gaining media attention for projects such as Drake Shake, Where’s The Pixel, Lemme Tweet That For You, and WhoDat.biz; and for working with creative clients such as Nicola Formichetti and ITEM/IDEM.

By 2014, Ryder Ripps and OKFocus had completed custom digital projects for the Tanlines, Kenzo, Nike, and Been Trill. The same year, Ripps was the subject of a human-interest piece in the New York Times in which he was designated “consummate internet cool kid,” and received significant public praise for his work from Formichetti and Virgil Abloh. In 2015, he co-produced 2 songs on Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz.

In 2016, Forbes featured Ryder Ripps in their 30 Under 30 list. The same year, Ripps shot a campaign for a Marc Jacobs collaboration.

In 2016 Ripps also created the branding campaigns for mass media company, 88Rising. One year later, he was tapped to design the campaign for Abacus Pills. In 2018 he devised the branding for NUGGS, a soy-protein based chicken nugget substitute.

In 2018, Ripps began working with Kanye West as a part of DONDA .  Together, Ripps and West worked as creative directors for the first annual Pornhub awards in Los Angeles.  Ripps then went on to design and creative direct Pusha T’s mainstage performance at Coachella in 2019. The same year, he produced a lyric video for Swae Lee.

Ripps provided creative direction for the 2020 Miss Anthropocene album release by Grimes, including the logo design, album art and packaging, and digital campaign.

Art

Ryder Ripps attributes his interest in digital-based art to a combination of upbringing and the inherent dynamics of the internet’s structure. Reminiscing to the New York Times in 2014, Ripps is quoted: “In real life I was a really shy 10-year-old kid with arty parents...Online I was someone who was powerful, who could create things that people saw immediately.”

In 1998, at the age of 11, Ryder Ripps created his first portfolio of purely digitally-produced imagery.

Since the early aughts, Ripps has produced artwork that explores ideas of digital representation, digital aesthetics and connection. Working with both physical and digital media, his drive to create across a multitude of social media and internet-based platforms has been described as prolific.

In 2013 Ryder Ripps was sponsored by the Red Bull Music Academy, creating a performance piece titled Hyper Current Living. Performing for an entire week, Ripps both “lived” and “worked” in the Academy, generating ideas and disseminating them on twitter while consuming Red Bull energy drinks. A dedicated website displayed a comparison between the number of energy drinks finished and the number of ideas tweeted.  

In 2014, Ripps was selected for a residency program at the Ace Hotel. As stipulated by the program, he was granted a $50 allowance for art supplies and a free night’s stay at the Ace's Manhattan location. During the residency, he created the piece Art Whore, in which he solicits sex workers from Craigslist to join him at the hotel, with the sole purpose of drawing for 45 minutes. The work garnered immediate attention and prompted major controversy over ideas of authorship and exploitation, prompting Art F City to credit the work as “in the running for the most offensive project of 2014." In 2016, Artnet included the work in its list, "The 10 Most Controversial Art Projects of the Last Century " . In 2018 the work was also listed in an article titled “14 Art World ‘Bad Boys’ Whose Macho Work Was Impossible to Ignore” alongside Piero Manzoni and Chris Burden.

In late 2014, Ripps created HO, a painting series featuring Instagram model Adrianne Ho. The series was shown as a solo exhibition in early 2015 at Postmasters Gallery in New York. Once more, his work sparked debate over issues of authorship and exploitation, culminating with an email death threat, attempting to blackmail the artist into closing the show.

In 2015, Ryder Ripps was invited back to work with Red Bull, at Red Bull Studios. The performance ALONE TOGETHER was comprised of six performers seated at cubicles, which were encased in a plexiglass box. The performers were instructed to use the internet in the same manner they would in their private life, while viewers watched from a floor above. The work also included a constructed viewing box that synthesized all the performers’ web activity into a single feed. In addition to questioning human relationships in a digital age and the human/corporal connection to digital space, this work draws heavily on Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés.

Ryder Ripps: Barbara Lee, was a solo exhibition held in 2016 at the Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles. A sculptural representation of the 1973 World Trade Center towers, the work features over a collage of over 50,000 photographs sourced from the internet. According to Ripps, the work is a critique of the vicious cycle of clickbait culture.

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, Zuecca Projects and The Ryan Foundation provided a two-part exhibition curated by Natalie Kovacs and created by Ripps, DIVENTARE SCHIAVO (Become A Slave). The first part, VRR (Virtual Reality Reality), “is a full-body virtual reality experience that requires the viewer to become a factory worker making VR headsets.” The second part, Voice of God, “places visitors at the center of a quadraphonic, 3D soundscape composed of a flurry of voices…”

In 2018, Ripps, in collaboration with photographer Maggie West, exhibited Pornhub Nation, a large interactive installation sponsored by Pornhub. The exhibition depicts a future history of the porn site's own government. It provided parodied solutions to the topics of climate change, military occupation, governmental surveillance, and space exploration.

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