Sick and Tired at the Met is a coloring book consisting of 99 drawings emanating from a multi-day on-site performance in which the author drew every object defined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s search engine as “sick” and “tired” for 17 minutes each, the average amount of time an American spends with their doctor per visit.

As an artist and educator with a diagnosis-avoidant chronic illness, Ryan created this work at the continent’s largest museum as an embodied metaphor for tracking an illness across different care networks, appointments, spreadsheets and panicked web searches. The book was first exhibited at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota in partnership with the Mayo Clinic’s Medical Humanities Department in September 2025 as part of the artists solo show, “Face in Clouds, invisible ink.”

Ryan Woodring (he/they) is compelled by his body’s furtive miscalibration to find sustained agency for unpredictable and illegible modes of being using experimental, time-based visualization practices. He draws from a decade of experience as a visual effects artist helping to realize award-winning projects such as House of Cards and Kubo & the Two Strings, as well as an extensive teaching and arts organizing practice. He recently founded the Soft Data/Base, a net archive compiling artistic practices that create soft data for illegible experience, and co-founded Prequel Low-Residency in Portland, Oregon. 

Woodring earned his MFA from Rutgers University and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Drew University in New Jersey. He has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, The International Museum of Surgical Science, the Portland Biennial, and elsewhere, receiving project support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council Oregon, Institute of Network Cultures, and others. His work has been included in publications such as Hyperallergic, Interview Magazine, and Redefine Magazine. 

His writing has been published by the International Journal of Education in the Arts and Irrelevant Press. He is a 2025 Grand Rounds speaker at Mayo Clinic. Woodring lives in New York, where he is a member of Blockbusters Video and New Media Collective.