Community organizing has been a major component of Ryan’s work, utilizing a talent for promotion and media, his strong organizational and negotiation skills, and a unique ability to merge grassroots ideas and actions with a larger focus. 

One of the founders and operators of the five year old ARTWHERK! Collective (which makes space and provides opportunities to emerging queer artists in gallery, performance, and club spaces).  Alongside Christopher Hayden, Chris Jai Centeno, and Kevin Charlie, Ryan has overseen ARTWHERK!’s incredible growth.   Starting out as  a one-time exhibition in the attic above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, the collective’s  initiative returned the next year, eventually moving on to Church Street office space.  Enough of a success there to move on to Hotshot gallery in Kensington market and have the opening covered by CTV news, ARTWHERK! has now found a home at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Ryan’s work with the collective has included helping young queer artists with school placements and residencies, providing art opportunities to newcomer Canadians, fostering relationships between artists and different communities, promoting artists of color, ensuring wheelchair accessibility of spaces, and creating social and work spaces that are accessible and welcoming to all, regardless of age, gender, ability, or sexuality.  In ensuring that emerging artists can find a place in Toronto’s various art and performance scenes, Ryan’s efforts through the ARTWHERK! Collective have been unique and effective. 

For a year and half, Ryan curated Granny Boots, the Gladstone Hotel’s weekly mix of queer art, performance and politics.  This involved him in many activist movements, and he is particularly proud of putting artists of color, youth artists, sex-positive artists, and marginalized artists front and centre. 

Ryan has also produced many fundraising events, most notably To Haiti with Love (co-produced with Dj Craig Dominic), a Haiti earthquake relief fundraiser on behalf of Toronto’s lbtq community that garnered national press.   He has also curated an art auction for The Youthline and was handpicked twice by RM Vaughn to co-curate Art Attack, Buddies in Bad Times’ annual art auction.