The Exhibition

Hit a HOME RUN in your heart with little things that turn normal days into something worth celebrating. Ryan Spring Dooley brings his multi-genre talents to the cultural association Atelier on the historic Via Panisperna of Rome for an intimate exhibition of personal achievement. In work both ecstatic and sobering, Spring Dooley combines a bright palette with a penchant for rich content and emotive themes pulled from his mixed cultural experiences between the United States and Italy for nearly 30 years.

Using material from a recent trip to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota, Spring Dooley blends past and present with a range of techniques that also represent different artistic evolutions throughout his life: from painting to graffiti, street art, performance, and film. The exhibition will feature a wall with 100 heads, some original textile productions, and an artist’s book that commemorates in both English and Italian a sensibility for transforming a mundane story or a small drawing into grand occasions.

The Artist

Ryan Spring Dooley was born in 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA and raised in an artist community with his mother. He attended the University of Minnesota to study art and immediately embraced the contamination of genres: music, painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, video, and graffiti. While studying abroad at the Università di Pavia in Northern Italy, he met Peter Schuman and worked with the Bread and Puppet Theater, learning elements of performance that led to periods of extended travel in Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon, where he developed a unique style of street art.

Spring Dooley moved to Italy full-time in 2000 to continue his practice of graffiti and street art, performing and exhibiting around Europe, including a 2008 exhibition titled “Junkbuilding” at the Triennale Bovisa. Transferring from Naples to Rome in 2009, he continues to mix techniques of painting with performance art, including video, sound, and place-based interventions. He is also a composer, saxophonist, and singer involved with multiple groups and projects, including the band Dads of Darkness in Rome.