SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum presents Natalie Ball: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Snake (August 10–November 17, 2019), the solo exhibition of the winner of the 2018 Betty Bowen Award. Natalie Ball approaches her sculptural work through the lens of auto-ethnography, dislodging dominant narratives and expectations surrounding Native experience and history to establish more complex racial narratives.

For her solo show at SAM, Ball created two new mixed-media sculptures that wryly challenge the visual legacies and representations of Native Americans. In the two works, the artist uses traditional Indigenous forms, playfully suggestive homonyms, repurposed fabrics, and animal hides to complicate and reclaim Indigenous histories and forms of knowledge.

Re-Run (2019) features a large textile stretched loosely across two large pine sticks. It’s composed of various found materials, including repurposed athletic wear, quilts, and rattlesnake skins. The form of You Mist, Again (Rattle) (2019) bears a host of associations: an oversized rattle, a traditional Native baby carrier, and the snake whose skin adorns the work. Materials such as animal skins, braiding hair, bullet shells, and a lone pink Converse shoe all offer different meanings depending on the viewer.

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon; she currently lives and works in Chiloquin, Oregon, her ancestral homelands. 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 has an MFA degree in Painting & Printmaking from Yale School of Art.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including: Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Te Manawa Museum, NZ; Half Gallery, NY; Portland Art Museum, OR; Museum of Contemporary Native Art (MoCNA), NM; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and SculptureCenter, NY. She has received prestigious awards including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and an upcoming 2020 Rauschenberg Residency.