Natalie Ball
Tribe: Black / Klamath / Modoc
Based In: Chiloquin, OR
Email: nataliemarieball@gmail.com
Social Media: @natalie_m_ball
Website: nataliemball.com
About the Artist
Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree 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 attained her Master’s degree, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands to raise her three children. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including the Half Gallery, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Blum & Poe, LA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Gagosian, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Almine Rech Gallery, FR; and SculptureCenter, NY. Natalie attained her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018. 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.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Brother, Mom
pastel on paper, 2020
These artwork were curated into the 2020 Telling Our Own Stories exhibition by yəhaw̓.
About the Art
These four portraits are an exercise I did with my kids exploring self-determination through portraiture. It is practicing seeing and determining ourselves outside of colonial discourses by negotiating and playing with them through humor to tease out projections and expectations to then negotiate and refuse them.
We made each piece together. We took turns mark-making, talking, and laughing with a mirror and without a mirror, to build collective images full of information tied to kinship and story. Self-determination is the foundation and constant exploration of my studio practice. As an Indigenous woman, who is Black and Indian, I communicate my experiences within a larger history of intersectionality through materiality and gesture. I am interested in expanding what Native American identity and art are, and what they can be. My work always goes back to my Ancestors, communities, family, history, experiences, and to my children.
This artwork was commissioned by yəhaw̓ for the 2019 King Street Station exhibition.
About the Art
Keeping in line with the show’s thematic focus, my approach for my commissioned piece is to acknowledge place in relation to community, identity, and shared history through an installation. I create visual stories that are informed by the complexity of Native American lives, like my own, which acknowledge intersections to strengthen and better understand ourselves, the nation, and necessarily our shared histories. As an Indigenous woman and mother, I foster my intergenerational and intertribal connections within the Pacific Northwest. These connections are ancient. For this project, I use Celilo Falls as a starting point, and as a point of departure to acknowledge ancestral intersections. Celilo Falls is a place of intertribal connection for the Pacific Northwest that extends thousands of years on the Columbia River. Though Celilo Falls now lies dormant, our connections continue today. This project is generous in materiality, ideas of place, complex experiences, and shared history in order to fill in the gaps between trading objects, gestures, and bartering and our contemporary connections. The viewer is implicated based on the materiality and gesture of the piece’s sculptural objects—tribalism, capitalism, motherhood, matriarchy, place, and (not-too-distant) futurism.