Public Lecture: Natalie Ball

Natalie Ball

Join us at deSalle Auditorium on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, at 6pm for a free, public lecture from artist Natalie Ball. Cranbrook Academy of Art’s 2023-24 Public Lecture Series is free and open to the public in the deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum. Please note the museum’s galleries will be closed, enter through the Cranbrook Academy of Art Library doors.

Natalie Ball (*1980 in Portland) lives and works Chiloquin (Oregon). She received her M.F.A. in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University, New Haven.

Natalie Ball, a citizen of the Klamath tribes, is best-known for repurposing and re-contextualizing found materials and media that often confront the reductive narratives surrounding Native American identity. Working from her ancestral homelands in the rural community of Chiloquin, Oregon, Ball approaches her sculptural work to challenge the narrative surrounding the Native American experience and history. Ball’s use of materials is wide-ranging, often incorporating traditional, indigenous materials with found objects ranging from textiles, leather, beads, and wood to coyote teeth, hair, fur, and bone. It is this juxtaposition, which sometimes bordering on the absurd that allows Ball to create a new auto-ethnographic narrative as she excavates hidden histories, and dominant narratives to deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses to build a visual genealogy that refuses to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans.

Natalie Ball’s works are currently on view at the Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida. In 2019 Ball had a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA.

Selected exhibitions include Vancouver Art Gallery; Sculpture Center New York; Museum of Northwest Art in Red Ink, Washington; Instute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australien; Berkley Art Center; Museum of Contemporary Art Miami; La Biennale d´ Art Contemporaine Autochtone in Montréal, Canada; Gagosian Gallery New York; Blum & Poe Gallery Los Angeles; Nino Mier Gallery Los Angeles; Half Gallery New York; Bortolami Gallery New York; Galerie Almine Rech Paris.

Works of Natalie Ball in the Collection of the Seattle Art Museum, the Rubell Family Collection, the Collection of Beth Rudy de Woody, Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem among others.

Natalie Ball received the 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters & Sculptors and the 2020 Hallie Ford Foundation Fellow from The Ford Family Foundation