“I map personal and historical landscapes allowing them to travel through generations to engage the history of violence, dispossession, and survival; connecting and filling in gaps and forging stories to hold space for new and complex narratives to exist.”

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she received a Master of Arts, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands in Chiloquin to raise her three children. Natalie attained her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018. 

Ball’s work has been shown internationally, including recently with the Half Gallery, New York, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Gagosian, New York, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France; and SculptureCenter, New York, New York; and locally in the 2019 Biennial, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. 

She is the recipient of the 2021 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship, 2020 Bonnie Bronson Award, 2020 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the 2018 Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum.

“Natalie works in a tradition of West Coast/California Assemblage, reminiscent of the 1970s Los Angeles Funk based free Assemblage,” says Essence Harden, an independent curator. “Through her chosen objects, attributed to indigenous identity, Natalie reassesses indigeneity as a space outside of bounded thinking.”

Check out our Studio Visit with Natalie Ball here.