Ryan Arnott has been a visual artist for over 40 years. He takes a playfully serious approach to his art-making, which is rooted in prairie landscape and influenced by pop, surrealist and conceptual art concerns. He creates thought-provoking images and objects in a variety of materials.

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Ryan hanging an art show at the University Club.

Photo by Bill Hambly.

He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction from the University of Regina (1975) and also studied printmaking at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax where he lived from 1976 to 1982.

Arnott has had a number of exhibitions across Canada and his artworks are in public collections; most notably the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Permanent Collection, and the Canada Council Art Bank.

Arnott has worked professionally as a Certified Picture Framer and as a Preparator, looking after the Saskatchewan Arts Board Permanent Collection for twelve years and the Saskatchewan Legislative Building Art Collection for seventeen years. He was also a Sessional Lecturer in sculpture at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College.

Acting as a Visual Art Consultant, Arnott contributed to the successful completion of two major art projects that were unveiled by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2005: the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Statue by Susan Velder and the Saskatchewan Centennial Mural by Roger Jerome. For this, and other work, he was awarded the Commemorative Medal for the Centennial of Saskatchewan by Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock.

For over a decade, he has organized and curated art exhibitions at The University Club at the University of Regina.