Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and curator Ryan E. Steadman has shown his paintings regularly since 2001, with solo exhibitions at Baumgartner Gallery, Envoy Enterprises and Karma, all in Manhattan. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at Greenberg van Doren Gallery and Room East, among others.

Steadman has been a regular contributor to artforum.com and Modern Painters since 2011. In this short time, he has reviewed exhibitions by acclaimed artists such as Agnes Denes and Eugen Schoenebeck, as well as written essays on New York-based artists as diverse as Anthony Goicolea and Ethan Greenbaum.

After having curated exhibitions in Boston and New York, Steadman was recently appointed curatorial advisor to the UNTITLED. Art Fair in Miami Beach. Before this, he worked for such well-known galleries as Feature Inc. and Peter Freeman Inc. Steadman earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1999, and a BFA from University of Georgia in 1997.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. I’m a triple threat. I make art, write about art, and curate.

How has living in New York affected your art practice? Living in New York has definitely had a hand in my paintings shrinking to under a foot in size. Real estate here is a crime.

What kinds of things are influencing your work right now? That’s a good question. I’m interested in Americana right now. How did we get into this mess? Images of ideas past, left abandoned. At the same time, I’m also interested in the generic nature of abstraction.

If you were a drink what drink would you be? Definitely an Arnold Palmer.

What artists are you interested in right now? As a critic, I’m interested in many artists, but ones who pertain to my practice include Jim Lee, Barb Choit, and Graham Collins.

What past trends in art do you think should never come back? Retro computer graphics-as-abstraction.

Who would you ideally like to collaborate with? Hm, that’s a good question… probably a photo-based artist like Anne Collier or Ethan Greenbaum.

What do you want a viewer to walk away with after seeing your work? A sense that maybe they didn’t know themselves as well as they thought.

What are you reading right now? 9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis. Every art student in America should be reading this book. Any current or upcoming shows we should know about? Word on the street is that I will have some work in a show in Chicago.