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Natalie Ball

She // Her // Hers

Visual Artist

Chiloquin, Oregon

A photograph of a woman with brown skin and dark brown eyes gazing directly into the camera with a serious expression. Her long, voluminous curly black hair falls around her shoulders and fills the frame of the photo.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Ball has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in Aotearoa (New Zealand) at Massey University where she obtained her Master’s degree with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art. She then relocated to her ancestral Homelands in Southern Oregon/Northern California to raise her three children. In 2018, Natalie earned her MFA in Painting & Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship (2021), The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship (2020), the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2020), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), and the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award (2018). Ball is now an elected official serving on the Klamath Tribes Tribal Council.

Donor -This award was generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.26.2024

A sculpture vaguely shaped like a person sits atop a white pedestal. Converse sneakers peek out of the bottom of a trunk made of textiles and quilts wrapped with bands of material around a bundle of sticks. The sleeve of a T-shirt is visible at top left.

Toes Out by Natalie Ball, 2021. Converse shoes, spur, elk hide, textiles, leather, wood, dimensions 36.67 × 15 × 12.67 inches.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

A colorful quilted textile hangs suspended from a wooden branch in front of a white wall. The textile itself is draped, obscuring parts of the work and giving the illusion of a bright red-and-white patterned star bursting into blue, yellow, pink, and green geometric shaped diamonds. The points of the stars leap off of the fabric and are sculpted from animal hair, rope, and other materials.

Bang Bang by Natalie Ball, 2019. Elk hide, wood, rope, rabbit fur, paint, textiles, dimensions: 84 × 124 inches.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

A square-shaped quilt hangs on a wooden branch and is divided into four sections, like window panes. Each of the four quadrants hold colorful eight-pointed stars, their tidy geometric shape unraveling and abstracting across the piece.

Deer Woman's new Certificate-of-Indian-Blood-skin by Natalie Ball, 2021. Textiles, deer and porcupine hair, chenille, paint, beads, seeding sage, wood, rope, dimensions 83.25 × 59.125 × 44.5 inches.

Photo courtesy of the artist.