Archives of American Art

A Finding Aid to the Paul Ryan papers, 1931-2009, in the Archives of American Art

Summary

Collection ID:
AAA.ryanpaul
Creators:
Ryan, Paul, 1943-
Dates:
1931-2009
Languages:
The collection is in English.
Physical Description:
19.7 Linear feet
Repository:
The Paul Ryan papers measure 19.7 linear feet and document Ryan's education and career as a pioneering video artist, theorist, writer, and educator. Records include school records, family papers, correspondence, writings, project files, video recordings, teaching files, printed materials, scattered photographs, and artwork by others. Organizational records are also found for the Earthscore Foundation, Earth Environmental Group, the Gaia Institute, and the Raindance Corporation, among others. The bulk of Ryan's professional work is documented in his writings and project files.

Scope and Contents

Scope and Contents
The Paul Ryan papers measure 19.7 linear feet and document Ryan's education and career as a pioneering video artist, theorist, writer, and educator. Records include school records, family papers, correspondence, writings, project files, video recordings, teaching files, printed materials, scattered photographs, and artwork by others. Organizational records are also found for the Earthscore Foundation, Earth Environmental Group, the Gaia Institute, and the Raindance Corporation, among others. The bulk of Ryan's professional work is documented in his writings and project files.
Biographical materials include family papers, early correspondence among Ryan family members, school records, selective service records, photographs of Paul Ryan, and career documentation such as résumés, CVs, recommendation letters, and narratives written by Ryan describing his career. Records related to Ryan's time in the seminary and monastery include letters home during this period, and his letter of resignation from 1965.
Correspondence is mainly professional in nature, and spans Ryan's career. Correspondence between Ryan and family members is also found. Professional correspondence is found with Myrdene Anderson, Peter Berg of Planet Drum, Morris Berman, Avery Johnson, Marga Bijvoet, Thomas Berry, Lois Bianchi, David Dunn, Roberta Kevelson, Gerrit Lansing, Aldo Lira, Oliver Lowenstein, Chip Lord, Claude Ponsol, Jody Procter, Jodi Sibert, Phyllis Gershuny Segura, Michael Shamberg, and Marita Sturken. Corporate correspondence is found regarding job applications, manuscript submissions to publishers, and video submissions to museums and broadcasters.
Writings include mainly articles and notebooks by Ryan, but also drafts of books, lectures, poetry, short stories, a treatment for a television show, and writings by others in various genres. Most of Ryan's prose writing is theoretical in nature, although personal writings and notes from projects are also found. Articles include both published and unpublished writings, with some published multiple times under different titles. Over one hundred notebooks spanning forty years contain a variety of content including drafts of letters, articles, grant proposals, lectures, and other writings. Ryan's two major publications,
Cybernetics of the Sacred
and
Video Mind, Earth Mind
, are documented with drafts, contracts, correspondence with publishers, layout documents, and notes.
Organizational records include writings, correspondence, printed material, financial records, grant proposals, and other records concerning various organizations, collectives, and companies in which Ryan participated, mostly having to do with environmental advocacy, video production, or a combination of the two. Organizations with substantial records in this series include the Earth Environmental Group, the Earthscore Foundation, Environment '89 (and '90, '91, and '92), the Gaia Institute, and the Raindance Corporation, among others. Documentation is most comprehensive for The Earthscore Foundation, including by-laws, grant proposals, extensive writings, financial records, and printed materials.
Project files contain video recordings, production notes, photographs, proposals, correspondence, a computer program designed by Ryan, prints for exhibition, illustrations and designs, posters, circulars, contracts, and scripts. Many of the projects documented in this series relate to Ryan's many explorations of the use of video to monitor and interpret two seemingly different subjects, environmental change and human behavior in relationships, expressed through a ritual of interaction among three persons designed by Ryan and called "Threeing," or "Triadic Behavior." The most thoroughly documented projects in this series include "Nature in New York City," "New York City Eco-Channel for Sustainable Television (NEST),"
Talking Wood
(a publication that incorporated the project "Watershed Watch"), "Inventing Triadic Behavior" (also known as the "Triadic Tapes"), "Tethys"(with artist Bob Schuler), and "Video Wake for my Father," a performance for video that saw many iterations, including a private performance, a public performance, an edited video program, and a published script.
Video recordings are found for three projects, including "Nature in New York City," "Inventing Triadic Behavior," and a threeing workshop held at the Kitchen entitled "Video Variations on Holy Week." A printout of records in a videotape database kept by Ryan is found in this series, with a proposal for video preservation; the list of tapes includes those found in the collection as well as tapes not extant.
Teaching files include documentation of Ryan's work at Dalton School, Hudson School, the New School for Social Research, and Savannah College of Art and Design, and many other workshops and training programs Ryan taught. Included are grade books, correspondence, curricula, training materials, and reports. Two of his programs, the Black Rock Rangers at the Dalton School, and the Urban Conservation Corps Pilot Video Program involve the implementation of the Earthscore Notational System in school curricula.
Printed material includes books, newspaper clippings, conference programs and published proceedings, exhibition catalogs and announcements, film and video programs, flyers, periodicals, poetry publications, posters, and materials relating to the artist Al Robbins, which includes an obituary written by Ryan. Also found are publications of the Raindance Corporation, which include the book,
Guerrilla Television
(1971), and four issues of their magazine,
Radical Software
(1971-1972). Most of the printed material was either written by Paul Ryan, contains articles by Paul Ryan, or documents activities of Paul Ryan. Other materials found contain works by Ryan's associates and collaborators.
Artwork contains artists' books, doodles, illustrations, prints, and photographs by named and unnamed artists. None of the artwork in this series appears to be by Ryan. Notable is an artist's book entitled "Patterns" by Lida Zerella, which incorporates still images from Ryan's Triadic Tapes in a small album. Two illustrations are found by Claude Ponsot, who also illustrated many of Ryan's publications relating to Kleinform and threeing.

Arrangement

Arrangement
This collection is arranged as 8 series.
  • Series 1: Biographical Material, 1931-2003 (0.8 linear feet; Boxes 1, 20)
  • Series 2: Correspondence, 1965-2007 (2 linear feet; Boxes 1-3)
  • Series 3: Writings, 1955-2001 (6.8 linear feet; Boxes 3-10, 20)
  • Series 4: Organizational Records, 1968-1996 (1.2 linear feet; Boxes 10-11, 20, OV 21)
  • Series 5: Project Files, 1968-2008 (6.5 linear feet; Boxes 11-17, 20, OV 21-22, 24, RD 26)
  • Series 6: Teaching Files, 1967-2008 (0.7 linear feet; Box 17)
  • Series 7: Printed Materials, 1968-2009 (1.6 linear feet; Boxes 18-20, OV 23, 25)
  • Series 8: Artwork, 1965-2003 (0.1 linear feet; Boxes 19-20, OV 22)

Biographical / Historical

Biographical / Historical
Paul Ryan was a pioneering video artist, writer, teacher, and theoretician based in New York City and the Hudson Valley of New York State. Born in 1943, Ryan spent his early adulthood as a seminarian and later a member of the Roman Catholic order of Passionist monks, which he left in 1965. He eventually received a B.A. from New York University. During the Vietnam War, Ryan received conscientious objector status and studied with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham University as alternative service. It was McLuhan's influence that led Ryan to begin to explore the possibilities of the medium of video.
In 1969, Ryan participated in the landmark exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium" curated by Howard Wise, which served to link the kinetic art movement of the 1960s with the emergent medium of video art. The first exhibition in the United States devoted to video, "TV as a Creative Medium" signaled radical changes and defined an emerging artistic movement. In 1969 Ryan co-founded the Raindance Corporation along with Ira Schneider, Michael Shamberg, David Cort, Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and others. Raindance was an influential media collective that proposed radical theories and philosophies of video as an alternative form of cultural communication. Influenced by the communications theories of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, the collective produced tapes and writings that explored the relation of cybernetics, media, and ecology. From 1970-1974, Raindance published the seminal video journal
Radical Software
, which provided a network of communications for the fledgling alternative video movement. In 1971, Shamberg published
Guerrilla Television
, a summary of the group's principles and a blueprint for a decentralization of television through access to public and cable programming. The original Raindance collective dispersed in the mid-1970s; the nonprofit Raindance Foundation continued into the 1990s. Ryan's core writings from the Raindance era were gathered into his 1973 publication
Birth and Death and Cybernation
, republished in 1974 as
Cybernetics of the Sacred
.
Ryan's work to develop alternative uses of video technology continued long after his involvement with Raindance. He began to implement his theories about the use of video monitoring and feedback within dynamic systems with the work that came to be known as the Earthscore Notational System. With Steve Kolpan and Bob Schuler, he founded the Earthscore Foundation, through which he raised money for the exploration and development of this applied practice. Earthscore, based largely on the writings of philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce and Gregory Bateson's work on cybernetics, provided the theoretical and logical underpinnings of both the ecosystem documentation and interpretation process, and the triadic rituals of interpersonal behavior, that became the core of Ryan's work for much of his life. These ideas were implemented in a wide variety of projects such as eco-channel design, video scores specific to certain locations, threeing projects exploring interpersonal behavior with video and computer technology, and a curriculum for combining media production training with environmental education.
Ryan later worked with organizations such as Talking Wood, The Earth Environmental Group, and Environment '89, (re-named in later years Environment '90, '91, and '92) to implement Earthscore systems and prototypes. He co-founded The Gaia Institute, hosted at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and co-directed it from 1985-1991. The Institute fostered dialogs between science, religion, and art through workshops, lectures, exhibitions and events. He was an artist-in-residence for Earth Environmental Group in 1988 via a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and used the residency to carry out his video project "Nature in New York City," documenting city ecosystems and demonstrating how an eco-channel might work. Environment '89 organized a coordinated campaign for a cable channel devoted to the environment, the New York City Eco-channel for a Sustainable Tomorrow (NEST).
Ryan spent his later years as a professor of media production and theory at Savannah College of Art and Design, and then at the New School for Social Research. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States, including "The Primitivism Show" in The Museum of Modern Art (1984), "The American Century Show" at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1999-2000), and the Venice Biennale (2002). He died in 2013.

Administration

Author
Megan McShea
Sponsor
Funding for the processing of this collection was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, administered through the Council on Library and Information Resources' Hidden Collections grant program.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The papers of Paul Ryan were donated to the Archives of American Art by Ryan in 2008.
Processing Information
The collection was fully processed and a finding aid prepared by Megan McShea in 2013-2014 with funding provided by the Council on Library and Information Resources' "Hidden Collections" grant program. Born-digital material was processed by Kirsi Ritosalmi-Kisner in 2020 with funding provided by the Smithsonian Collection Care and Preservation Fund.

Using the Collection

Conditions Governing Access
Use of original papers and archival audiovisual recordings with no duplicate access copy requires advance notice.
Terms of Use
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Preferred Citation
Paul Ryan papers, 1931-2009. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Keywords

Keywords table of terms and types.
Keyword Terms Keyword Types
Art -- Study and teaching Topical Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Monasticism and religious orders Topical Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Video artists -- New York (State) -- New York Occupation Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Photographs Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Prints Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Illustrations Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Video recordings Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Writings Genre Form Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Bianchi, Lois Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Dunn, David Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Bijvoet, Marga, 1948- Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Johnson, Avery Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Kevelson, Roberta Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Lansing, Gerrit Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Lira, Aldo Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Lord, Chip Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Robbins, Al Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Procter, Jody, 1943-1998 Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Ponsol, Claude Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Lowenstein, Oliver Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Anderson, Myrdene, 1934- Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Berg, Peter, 1937-2011 Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Berman, Morris Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Berry, Thomas, 1914-2009 Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Zerella, Lida Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Sibert, Jodi Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Sturken, Marita, 1957- Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Segura, Phyllis Gershuny Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Shamberg, Michael Personal Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Gaia Institute Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Earth Environmental Group Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Savannah College of Art and Design Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
New School for Social Research (New York, N.Y.) Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Raindance Corporation Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Earthscore Foundation Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid
Dalton School (New York, N.Y.) Corporate Name Search Smithsonian Collections Search ArchiveGrid

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