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 undiagnosed chronic illness to create sustained agency for unpredictable and illegible modes of being using experimental, time-based visualization practices. He recently founded the Soft Data/Base–a net archive compiling creative projects that generate soft data for illegible experience–at Drew University, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Digital Media. He has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as Rochester Art Center, The Museum of the Moving Image, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, The International Museum of Surgical Science, the Portland Biennial, and elsewhere. His writing on navigating undiagnosed illness through art was recently published by the International Journal of Education in the Arts. Woodring is a 2025 Grand Rounds speaker at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He lives in New York, where he is a member of Blockbusters Video and New Media Collective.