Matthew N Courtney

Matthew Courtney uses clay to express non-physical phenomena such as inner/spirit, a sense of place, an idea, a memory, a belief or feeling. Symbols such as rockets in his work mixes boyhood memories of model plane building, playing war and physical self-discovery, with anxiety over the cold war and present wars over oil and ethnic cleansing. Courtney received his BS in Industrial Design from Philadelphia College of Art in 1984 and his MFA in Ceramics from Kent State University in 1991. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA where he has been a Ceramics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1998 and a Three Dimensional Design instructor in the Foundation program at The College of Art and Design at The University of the Arts since 2000. Throughout his career, Courtney has received the Hunt Art Futures Program, Teaching Fellowship, Administered through The Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998), the Ohio Arts Council, Individual Artists Fellowship (1993), and the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artists award (1990). He has collaborated in numerous group exhibitions in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New York, North Carolina and Florida.

Courtney's was one of the artists in the 1992 exhibition at SPACES, Space for Six: New Art From the Region.