Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Bunch.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I have spent the past 15-plus years working in community arts, curating public events, and working with community members to find creative ways to make their neighborhoods more inspiring places to live, work, and create. In 2022, I ventured into a different nonprofit field for my day job, which freed up a lot of creative space personally to think about what’s next. Being raised in Michigan and living more than half of my life there and then moving to Ohio, just across the border, I’ve long been aware and curious about the role that state borders play in our lives. Toledo was originally founded as a Michigan city but was later traded to Ohio as the result of a border dispute known as “The Toledo War.” It’s an absurd tale, but one with massive, global impacts. Yet, Toledo, while having been part of both states, really is part of neither. I spend a fair amount of time in Detroit and Cleveland and I’m always amazed by how little artists, creatives, and culture workers in each of those cities know or care about the other. The state allegiance is stronger than the regional allegiance in many ways and I’ve been dreaming up ways to work toward solving that for many years. The job change offered opportunity to explore this as a passion project, and that’s how the OHMI Midcoast Industrial Project was born. It’s an art project in and of itself aimed at fostering connection, curiosity, and travel based on things I like to do, which is basically talk to other artists and eat cool sandwiches. I’ve laid the bumpers in the bowling alley, so to speak, to give the project some guardrails, but aside from that the process is really about seeing where it goes from here.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The challenges have been pretty minimal, for the most part. Any struggles were predominantly personal. Working in nonprofit, and specifically in arts administration is a tricky, double-edged kind of thing. The work is tremendously fulfilling, but it’s also very challenging. The tropes of being overworked and underpaid are quite true. Additionally, something that doesn’t get talked about a lot is the personal sacrifices nonprofit workers make to do their jobs, and I think this is exacerbated in arts nonprofit, you are a public servant, so you have to set some of your personal wants and needs aside to do the work. I don’t mean that in a whining way, I find it very noble among workers in our sector. But there is a bit of a challenge in arranging opportunities for others that you can’t partake in to create your own projects, or letting opportunities pass by because it would be unethical to engage in one way or another. These are pretty lofty problems to have, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t troublesome. In a cash-strapped small city like Toledo all those threads can feel like a knot pretty quickly. The result is sometimes you wind up thinking about a thing for a decade or so before you finally find the time, mental capacity, and resources to do it. Aside from that, it was just a lot of nights staying up too late learning to use the tools and getting people to respond to emails about a thing that didn’t exist yet. That part was actually pretty fun.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
My background is in creative writing and specifically poetry. I love writing and am constantly toying with content and style. But I’ve never just been satisfied with writing just for writing’s sake. I spend most of my time with visual artists and musicians, and I very much enjoy those media, probably more than reading much of the time, if I’m honest. I try to push myself and my work to do more than just be about words on the page. I enjoy performing and always tried to bring an extra energy to the poetry stage. That led to performing live with musicians, often improvisational. I was in a group called What’s Next. (With the period) for a while and I referred to myself as the Poet In Residence. It was crazy, totally free form, we never practiced and I would just show up to the gig and sometimes there’d be six or seven musicians, most of who I’d never met before and we’d just hit it and I would find a way to make the poems I’d written work, weaving in a little stand-up comedy and political rants and things like that. It was difficult and great fun! That led to a collaboration with my friend Lance Hulsey, where I’d record readings for him and he would take them into the studio and come back a few months later with these brilliant spoken word music albums. We have three albums and a single on all the streaming platforms under the moniker Kyrux Macist. I’ve also been working on a project called The Human Poetry Machine, which is an immersive installation piece where I write poems for people on the spot. That is evolving into another project with my photographer friend, Natalie Tranelli. Most recently, I collaborated with Natalie and my friend James Dickerson aka Dirtykics on a poetry-photography visual arts exhibition. It was my first proper gallery show and I loved it. It brought me great joy to see poetry presented as visual art and the collaborative nature of producing the exhibition and an accompanying book was a new kind of challenge and just wonderful fun. Lance and I performed live at the opening for the first time ever together, no rehearsal, which was a hoot. I’m hooked though and dreaming up lots of new literary arts-as-visual arts show to come. Who knows what else, maybe someday I’ll try to just write a book and stop procrastinating with all this other weird stuff lol.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Two letters: AI. Everything in the arts is about to experience a dramatic shift, and I don’t just mean for fine arts. Creative departments at agencies, programs at colleges and universities, and so many other associated fields are about to experience a real upheaval from what they have known to be true. I find it exciting because it’s so wildly unpredictable. I think about the massive shifts that happened when the internet was first new and then when social media was still in its Wild West phases. There will be this period of all the rules being broken and then eventually, someone will figure out a way to standardize it and monetize it and it will become stale and boring. I think artists do and always have played a really significant role in society. They are precious documenters of what it feels like to be in a specific time and place. Museums generally don’t exist without artists, and not just art museums. Generally, they are just fancy storage closets for the human story, but they are either designed by or filled with stuff that artists created. What is exciting to me about these emerging technologies is that they make creation more accessible. I think everyone is creative in their own way, if not an artist, and I feel happy thinking about the numbers of people who will be able to make anything they want come to fruition. It makes creating things feel much more egalitarian. Some people don’t like that idea. I don’t think it takes anything away from the importance of craft or process at all. Quite the opposite, I think we will have a reverence for handmade things that we haven’t had in more than a century or so… That’s a long way to say, I don’t know.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ohmimidcoastindustrial.com
- Instagram: @ohmi_arts
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/OHMImidcoastindustrial
- Linkedin: www.LinkedIn.com/in/ryanabunch
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/ohmi_arts
- Youtube: www.YouTube.com/@ohmi_arts
- Other: www.ryanallenbunch.com
Image Credits
Josh Byers
Jerry Gray
DougieFresh Photography
