Behind the cardboard sign

Matt Ruyle makes creative exchange with Tulsa’s homeless

In jeans and a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt, Matt Ruyle sits down across from me at Circle Cinema. He holds a painting of a woman with windblown hair and dark eyes, her chin up, her gaze forthright and sparkling. 

“This is Mary,” he says. 

Then there’s Leon, dynamic and grinning. And Thomas, a kid’s sweetness glinting through the teenager’s hard expression.

Ruyle’s “Behind the Cardboard Sign,” a 10-portrait series of homeless people in Tulsa, opens August 9 at Circle Cinema. The theater, which is located in a high-traffic artery for Tulsa’s homeless, recently premiered Sterlin Harjo’s “Mekko,” which takes place among homeless Native Americans in Tulsa.

Ruyle says he wanted to paint homeless people for years but realized “it’s a touchy subject.”

“There’s a risk of objectifying them, turning them into a sideshow. So I wanted to find a way to really connect with them.”

His solution? An exchange. He found people who were panhandling (and thus had already put themselves in the public eye to some extent) and offered to buy their signs if they would agree to let him paint their portraits. 

“Some of the interactions were long; some were very brief,” Ruyle says. “I always brought a marker and cardboard so they could replace their sign. That way it was a trade, giving them money for their sign, which for them is really their creative outlet.”

By trade, Ruyle works at Fransen Designs as a carpenter, transforming raw materials and attending to details in ways that remind him of painting. A high school dropout who studied art at Tulsa Community College and the Kansas City Art Institute, he describes himself as “probably a typical angsty and somewhat self-loathing artist.” 

Whatever unease he feels about his work or those interactions (“It was nerve-racking to approach them every time,” he says), Ruyle’s portraits are clear and bold. He paints in oils, with rich colors and a line that’s not at all shy. The works are on cardboard, to match the signs.

“I feel like it’s important for them to be equal, the signs and the paintings. It also has to do with the people being devalued, and cardboard is sort of transient. But I don’t have it all figured out conceptually,” he says with a smile. “It was more like an instinctual thing.” 

In all but one of the paintings, the subject looks directly at the viewer. 

“Homelessness is so far removed from what most of us experience,” Ruyle says. “It’s rare that we can actually meet person-to-person because of our resistance to what they’re asking from us. There’s often mental illness or addiction there too, and the taboo around that creates even more dysfunction. But being seen can be what a person needs most in that moment.

“I think this was really just about wanting to approach these people and talk to them. Being raised with some addiction in my family and seeing how it can dismantle a life over time, it created a sense of compassion or wanting to connect. Also, for me the human face is the most interesting to draw, to paint, to stare at. The people on the fringes are the most interesting subject to me.”

Ruyle plans to donate the exhibition’s proceeds to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, and he hopes it stirs something in those who come to see it.

But there’s one painting that’s already claimed.

“The first guy I approached, his name is Will. He was all about it right off the bat. He’s actually got a job and a vehicle now and lives in Texas. He wants to come up to see the show and buy his portrait. He wants to own that part of his life.”

For more from Alicia, read her article on Theatre Pops' production of Monty Python's Spamalot.