'Try anything': 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award Winner Jordan Ryan's career advice for new grads

Jordan Ryan (B.A. ’10), an administrator of public records for the city of Indianapolis, represents the future of historic preservation in Indianapolis. Ryan’s consistent focus on accessibility and civic engagement in their career has earned them Herron’s 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award.

A 2022 recipient of the Indianapolis Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 Award, as well as multiple honors from Indiana Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ryan is committed to work that uncovers forgotten spaces in the city of Indianapolis and surrounding communities.

Ryan’s eclectic post-graduate career includes archival work, historic preservation, exhibit curation, and advocacy. They’ve worked on subjects ranging from the history of housing discrimination to curating physical and digital collections for the Indiana Historical Society. They recently took a break from setting up a new archives space in a vacated court room to discuss the career they pursued after getting a degree in art history at Herron.

HERRON: Congratulations on winning the 2024 Herron Distinguished Alumni Award! You’ve been quite busy since you graduated in 2010. What are you up these days?

JORDAN RYAN: My current title is administrator of public records for the office of finance and management at the city of Indianapolis. That’s a very jargony title, so what I tell people is I'm the city-county archivist. It's my job to collect, describe, manage, and make accessible city and county records.

HERRON: What did your path to this job look like?

JORDAN RYAN: I stumbled into archiving—my background is in art history. One of my first jobs at the university was in the Herron art library. I was really into reference work, especially if it had to do with the library’s unique book collection and the digital collections. After spending a couple of years in the workforce after graduation, I went back to school to get a master’s degree in public history. Then I had a couple of positions with different cultural institutions, but I really found myself thriving in the architectural archives at the Indiana Historical Society. Part of that job was curating the Indianapolis Bicentennial for 2020 and I think that really set me up to know the right people, know city history, know what records were accessible, what weren't, and what was in the backlog.

After I left the Historical Society, I started my business—The History Concierge—and one of my biggest clients was the Department of Metropolitan Development, which covers things like city planning and historic preservation. They had an incredible archive of historic maps, land use maps, neighborhood plans, and transportation plans. I worked as a contractor for them for about a year and a half. Other departments would hear about the work I was doing with the Department of Metropolitan Development and ask me to look at their archives. That just kept happening and it was very clear that there was this need to have a centralized archivist for the entire city-county enterprise, so I just sort of fell into it, and eventually I ended up in this newly created position at the city.

HERRON: How did your art history degree inform your career path?

JORDAN RYAN: It's almost too open-ended in terms of what you can do with art history! It's a very rigorous, interdisciplinary degree that involves everything from history, archaeology, local government history, anthropology, visual culture, material culture, and design. I didn't really have a set road map when I graduated. I wasn't interested in the exhibit realm, so I moved into historic preservation after Herron. But I knew from the start that I was never going to be doing 106 reviews or National Register of Historic Places nominations, so I moved into architectural archives as someone who could read a blueprint.

HERRON: When did you first get into history and architectural preservation?

JORDAN RYAN: My dad was a docent for Indiana Landmarks, so that sort of introduced me to the field as a child. I really enjoyed the architectural history component of my art history classes at Herron. I came back to IUPUI after a couple of years because I thought I'd be an art conservator, but I wasn't into the chemistry part of it, so I'm a chem school dropout. [laughter] I got into the public history graduate program, though, which reinspired me to think about having a career looking at architectural history and interpreting the built environment.

HERRON: What motivates your work today? What keeps you pushing through the boring stuff?

JORDAN RYAN: What was always interesting to me is that there's not a lot written about Indianapolis by scholars because the city hasn't made its records accessible and doesn't have a public archive. It's hard to talk about this city when we don't have a lot of accessible materials, so I'm very motivated by finding the hidden gems throughout the buildings and making archives accessible so that scholars, researchers, and family historians can do the work. That way Indianapolis can be written about and interpreted and be part of the bigger architectural history conversation. How can we talk about Indy if we don't have everything archived and accessible?

HERRON: What's a recent win you've had in terms of making things more accessible?

JORDAN RYAN: I recently accessioned a massive collection of historic street scene, neighborhood, and downtown Indianapolis photographs as part of the Department of Metropolitan Development collection. These images had just been sitting in a filing cabinet, so I've been sorting them into piles by intersection and neighborhood. So for example, I think, “This tree canopy feels like this neighborhood on the north side.” Then I look at maps and zero in on what specific area of the neighborhood it’s in.

I think that collection is going to be really helpful because it's mostly 1970s and 1980s photographs, and a lot of our historic photo collections of downtown Indy end in the 1950s. We need to be looking at late 20^th-century photography collections, too, and I think this archive is going to pick up where other collections have left off and help us tell a fuller story about change in the city.