Jim Ricks

Jim Ricks is an American–born Irish conceptual artist, writer, and curator. He has exhibited throughout Ireland and internationally, including a number of public art projects.

Early life and education
Ricks was born in San Francisco, California. He started painting graffiti in the early 1990s. He studied photography and graduated from the California College of the Arts (2002), and received a Masters degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Burren College of Art programme (2007).

Career


Ricks's work utilises appropriation, institutional critique, politics, and humour. He has had solo shows in the United States, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Mexico.

Ricks was director of 126 Artist-run Gallery from 2007 to 2009, curating a number of shows and organizing exchanges with other artist-run spaces. With Stephanie Syjuco, he created knock-offs of work at the Frieze Art Fair in London, 2009.

In an ongoing body of work, "Jim Ricks has developed the method of synchro-materialism as a means to consider the territory where art meets capitalism", and he has used this methodology in exhibition, performance, and print since 2010. In 2015 he travelled to Afghanistan to make Carpet Bombing, a large traditionally made carpet featuring imagery of military drones – an updated version of Afghan's war rugs. He participated in the 2017 Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Public projects

 * Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen is a large inflatable sculpture designed for people to interact with and play on. It is a twice-the-size replica of a 6,000-year-old megalithic portal tomb, the Poulnabrone Dolmen situated in The Burren, County Clare. It traveled to venues around the Aughty Region of County Galway in June 2011 and was a Galway County Council project. Cristín Leach of The Sunday Times wrote: "'We need to start thinking more creatively about public art. Jim Ricks has. Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen... is a commentary on our past, our present, the concept of “brand Ireland” and the very idea of public art; and everyone is invited to bounce. A temporary, movable, witty, interactive, contemporary public artwork we are all invited to play with? [Alice] Maher has endorsed it as “the best public art piece...ever”. She might just be right.'"The piece was also shown alongside Jeremy Deller's 2012 inflatable Stonehenge, Sacrilege, in Belfast, and was featured in the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition Futures 12.
 * Ricks is working on the long-term, global public art project In Search of the Truth (or En Busca de la Verdad ). It is a collaboration with Ryan Alexiev, Hank Willis Thomas . The New York Times writes: "The “Truth Booth,” a roving, inflatable creation, in the shape of a cartoon word bubble with "TRUTH" in bold letters on its side, serves as a video confessional. Visitors are asked to sit inside and finish the politically and metaphysically loaded sentence that begins, "The truth is …"". The project has travelled Ireland, Afghanistan, South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Mexico,  recording and then exhibiting the thoughts of many people on the subject of truth in several countries.
 * Life's a Beach (Art imitates life), Gable end mural responding to the political Murals in Northern Ireland, Abercorn Rd., Derry, Northern Ireland, April 2016
 * Sesiones Publicas, San Agustín, La Lisa, Cuba, a LASA project, August 2017.

Museum projects
Ricks was invited to participate in a 2 year project called Sleepwalkers (2012–15) at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. He was one of six artists invited to use the museum's resources, in an "unusual experiment in exhibition production". Ricks's contributions included a tribute to Richard Hamilton (artist), unauthorized exhibitions, his solo show: Bubblewrap Game: Hugh Lane, 2013 – 14, and a closing event which included James Barry in 2014. Aidan Dunne of the Irish Times describes Ricks's participation as a "curatorial process of selection and validation, making a museum within the museum comprising works from the real collection, artworks borrowed from elsewhere, non-art objects from flea markets and a commissioned copy of an Ed Ruscha painting."

He exhibited at the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City in 2022.

Solo exhibitions

 * 2010 – Synchromaterialism, Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin, Ireland
 * 2013–2014 – Bubble Wrap Game: The Hugh Lane, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
 * 2015 – Alien Invader Super Baby (Synchromaterialism IV) Onomatopee, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
 * 2016–2017 – Centro de Ontología Nacional, Casa Maauad, Mexico City, Mexico
 * 2018 – Museo Ambulante Sebastián, Mexico City, Mexico
 * 2020 – Así Luce la Democracia | This is What Democracy Looks Like, Galeria Daniela Elbahara, Mexico City, Mexico
 * 2021–2022 – El camino a París y Londres pasa por las aldeas de Afganistán, Leon Trotsky Museum, Mexico City