Edmonton artist Ryan McCourt is best known for his constructed metal sculptures. These works range from abstract and figurative welded steel forms, to polychrome reliefs made from crushed aerosol cans, to elegant assemblages and wearable helmets made from soldered brass. His two-dimensional work includes photography, vexillography, and ambiguous illustration. His experimental music explores aesthetic and existential philosophical themes. McCourt founded the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop, a co-operative shared studio, and Common Sense, an artist-run gallery. His work has earned numerous honours, and is held in public and private collections in Canada, the United States, and beyond.
Ryan David McCourt was born in Edmonton in 1975, the youngest of five children of Ken and Sheelagh McCourt. He was educated in Edmonton at Patricia Heights Elementary, Hillcrest Junior High, and Jasper Place High School. Extensive travel outside Canada—particularly to Asia in the 1980s and Europe and Africa in the 1990s—contributed to an early and enduring cosmopolitan outlook.
McCourt studied a wide range of subjects at the University of Alberta, including engineering, genetics, computing science, music, drama, religion, and philosophy, before ultimately concentrating on visual art. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997 and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture in 1999, studying under British sculptor Peter Hide within Edmonton’s modernist tradition of constructed sculpture.
In 2000, McCourt mounted his first post-university solo exhibition and received the Helen Collinson Memorial Award. The following year, he served as Artistic Coordinator for The Works Art Expo 2001, an award-winning Edmonton arts festival.
In 2002, McCourt founded the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop (NESW), a cooperative shared-studio initiative dedicated to the production and promotion of contemporary sculpture. From 2002 to 2006, NESW independently produced the Big Things outdoor sculpture series at the Royal Alberta Museum, an unprecedented multi-year presentation of large-scale work. In 2003, McCourt taught Visual Fundamentals at the University of Alberta.
In 2004, McCourt unveiled A Modern Outlook, an 18-foot-tall monumental sculpture privately commissioned for an Edmonton site, alongside Alberta Premier Ralph Klein. In 2005, he organized the Alberta Centennial Sculpture Exhibition at the Royal Alberta Museum and exhibited his work in the United States for the first time, at Sculpturesite Gallery in San Francisco.
In 2006, McCourt became the first artist invited to display sculpture for a year outside Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre. His installation Will and Representation—four large sculptures based on the Hindu deity Ganesha—was censored ten months into its exhibition after the Mayor of Edmonton ordered their removal in response to a sectarian religious petition objecting to the sculptures’ nudity. The City of Edmonton formally reaffirmed the removal in 2014, another act of religiously discriminatory government censorship in clear violation of McCourt’s Canadian Charter-protected right to freedom of expression.
To actively counter the endemic ethical and aesthetic malaise of the local visual arts establishment, McCourt founded Common Sense in 2008, an independent artist-run gallery in downtown Edmonton. Operating outside both commercial and institutional models, the gallery returned 100% of sales proceeds to exhibiting artists. That same year, McCourt married fellow Edmonton artist Nola Cassady, and received the Connect2Edmonton “Column of the Year” award for his writing on visual art.
In 2009, McCourt won First Prize in the Headdress category at the Wearable Art Awards in Port Moody, British Columbia, for The Helmet of Laocoön. In 2010, he and Cassady welcomed their daughter, and McCourt’s anonymously-submitted artwork was selected as the featured image for Latitude 53’s notoriously exclusive National Portrait Gallery exhibition.
McCourt was named one of Avenue Edmonton’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2011 for his advocacy for local artists and his encouragement of critical discourse. He exhibited at the Leighton Art Centre in Calgary in 2012, and in 2013 his sculpture The Equilibrist was included in the Edmonton Contemporary Artists’ Society’s 20th annual exhibition.
In 2014, McCourt travelled to San Francisco and New York City, and visited the Clement Greenberg Collection in Portland, Oregon. His work appeared in Brain Storms, a survey of selected University of Alberta alumni, in 2015. In 2016, he was nominated to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as an Influential Alberta Artist of the last twenty-five years. That summer, his Edmontonian Flag was formally gifted to Mayor Don Iveson by Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations Grand Chief Randy Ermineskin “as a symbol of their commitment to collaboration, respectful dialogue and exploring shared opportunities” and “to symbolize a new dawn in Nation-to-Nation relationship building.”
In 2017, Edmonton City Council debated the possible adoption of the Edmontonian Flag as the city’s official flag. That year also saw McCourt present new brass sculptures in a solo exhibition at Common Sense, publicly exhibit his ambigram designs for the first time, and complete a four-week residency at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences in Georgia, where he became a Hambidge Fellow.
McCourt exhibited work produced during that residency in Hambidge Suite at Common Sense in 2018, and later that year undertook a second international residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland. In 2019, Edmonton retailer The Local Cannabist launched with a comprehensive brand identity designed by McCourt, and he mounted his first solo exhibition of sculpture in Calgary.
In 2020, an invited residency in Rajasthan, India, was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Remaining in Edmonton, McCourt designed and produced the MMA-themed board game Hexagon Fighting Championship. In 2021, artwork by McCourt was selected for The Establishment Brewing Company’s barrel-aged beer label program. That autumn, he participated in an unsanctioned boxing match in Edmonton against former Canadian heavyweight champion Ken Lakusta.
In 2022, McCourt’s sculptures were included in Jazz Influences at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. He also launched the Fellowship of Cunts RPG website and podcast. In 2023, McCourt travelled to Paris and presented Line + Form, a solo exhibition of recent brass sculptures, at the Art Gallery of St. Albert.
In early 2024, McCourt travelled to New Orleans, and later that year his crushed-can works were featured in Face/Waste at Steelcase Art Projects in Ontario. After nearly twenty-five years, the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop ended their collective operations in Edmonton, and after sixteen years, and over fifty exhibitions of artwork by local, national, and international artists, Common Sense closed in late 2024.
In 2025, McCourt began construction of a new backyard studio. His work was featured in Modern Luxuria magazine, and he continued to publish multimedia RPG narratives at FellowshipOfCunts.com, FriendsofIspin.com, and PirateBjork.com. In 2026, tracks from his recorded music began receiving radio airplay on CKUA. His recent music is available at Spunarounds.com.
Ryan McCourt 