Vice Studios may soon be saying “you’re welcome” to Ryan Wilson.
The company has tapped Wilson — best known by his professional moniker ThankYouX — to serve as its first artist in residence. The unique appointment, confirmed today by Vice Studios president Amy Powell, will find Wilson collaborating with development and creative teams on a variety of functions. He’ll be charged with originating new intellectual property, consulting on visual world-building for Vice Studios titles and conceptualize hybrid narrative formats that “bridge contemporary art, entertainment and technology,” per Vice.
The new gig is a reunion of sorts of Wilson and Powell, whose resume includes stints as head of entertainment marketing at Amazon, co-founder and CEO of Brillstein Creative Partners, and a long run at Paramount Pictures, exiting as president of Paramount Television in 2018. During her Paramount tenure, she commissioned Wilson to paint of portrait of Steve Jobs for her office on the lot.
Wilson, a native of Los Angeles, kick started his art career in 2009. He has since explored painting, sculpture, new media and immersive installations and presented his work at Art Basel, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, the Museum of the Future in Dubai and Francisco Carolinum Linz Museum in Austria. Fun facts: Wilson delivered a collaboration with iconic composer Hans Zimmer and once traveled to the International Space Station. His credits also include another solo project, State Of The Art, which blends digital and physical art. During the blockchain craze, he also explored digital art and worked with NFTs, and blended traditional art with Web 3.0.
“I grew up reading and watching Vice because it found stories and parts of culture that other media overlooked. That same curiosity and rawness has shaped my own work, so having the opportunity to work with someone as forward thinking as Amy Powell and lend my perspective to Vice feels like an exciting full circle moment,” Wilson said in a statement.
Powell said she’s always been struck by Wilson’s instinct of seeing where culture is headed before the general public catches on. “Years ago, the painting he created for my office sparked an extraordinary creative journey. That moment captured something I’ve always believed about Ryan: his work doesn’t just reflect culture — it creates connections and opens doors between worlds that don’t always intersect. Bringing him into Vice Studios as our artist in residence is a natural evolution of that relationship and we are excited to explore what happens when his artistic imagination meets our commitment to bold, unconventional storytelling.”
ThankYouX is repped by UTA.
