Ryan Standfest

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Office: 103 West Wilson Hall
Phone: (248) 370-3380
Email: [email protected]
Website: ryanstandfest.com

Ryan Standfest is a multi-disciplinary artist and publisher who lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. His upbringing in a working-class family that reaches back several generations in Detroit and in the copper mining communities of the upper peninsula of Michigan, has informed his practice as he responds to the lingering effects of broken manufacturing economies. In 2020, the Detroit-based Simone DeSousa Gallery (now Matéria) published a monograph of his work. Standfest’s public mural Supply & Demand can be seen on Michigan Avenue in Southwest Detroit. In 2010, he founded the small publishing house Rotland Press, for which he has edited a collection of comic strips by artist and filmmaker David Lynch, two volumes of political prints by Sue Coe, and a collection of early satirical cartoons by Swiss artist H.R. Giger. The press has been recognized in Art In America; Hyperallergic, The New York Times, and PRINT. As an arts writer, Standfest has authored arts criticism and essays, appearing in numerous art and culture journals. He contributed a chapter to the book Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (Penn State University Press, 2022). Standfest earned an MFA with a focus on Printmaking from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and a BFA with a focus in Printmaking and Drawing from Wayne State University in Detroit.