
Ryan Gipson II is an interdisciplinary storyteller from Saint Louis, USA. His practice would not be in existence without the city of Saint Louis or the people who inhabit it. Saint Louis, and his experience within it, is the underlying source material of every project. This being so, it is his responsibility to portray his city, its people, and its culture in innovative, truthful, creative, and commemorating ways. He subscribes to this ideology in hopes of his work challenging audiences and contemporaries to do the same—opposed to solely recreating and engaging with bodies of media that show Saint Louis (and everything else) in stereotypical fashions. As someone who exists outside of dominant culture, another driving force of his work is creating safe spaces where marginalized people can be explorative and transgressive of the status quo—all identities and ideologies are malleable in Ryan’s practice.

