Natalie Ball honored with Joan Shipley Award;
EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- January 13, 2015
Natalie Ball: Mapping Coyote Black, a solo show
February 5 – May 13, 2015
Reception: 6-8 pm, Thursday, February 5, 2015
Lecture: 7 pm in the Hudson Auditorium
More information contact:
Nerman Museum, Oppenheiner New Media Gallery
12345 College Boulevard, Overland Park, KS 66210
www.nermanmuseum.org
(913) 469-3000
Gallery hours: Tue, Fri, Sat: 10 am – 5 pm, Wed, Thu: 10 am – 8 pm, Sun: 12 pm to 5 pm, Closed Mondays
Free admission, Free guided tours by appointment, email: tours@nermanmuseum.org
Mapping Coyote Black
Chiloquin, OR-
Modoc and Klamath artist Natalie Ball will install Mapping Coyote Black within the museum’s Oppenheimer New Media Gallery. Her immersive installation employs deconstructed quilts as an essential element of her work. According to Ball, “Critical to the narrative of my installation is the character of Coyote. Coyote is famous, everyone knows that Coyote is a trickster; intelligent and powerful and at times Coyote plays the fool. I offer Coyote to viewers as a woman, the avatar of myself as artist. She is independent, shameless, hungry, able to switch forms and she has all Coyote’s traditional qualities and more. In my installation, she signifies what cannot be contained by performances of gender, race, and ethnicity. Her visual voice pieces together historical and lived experiences into speculative narratives. These narratives engage political fantasy with fluid concepts of time. Through this installation’s content, Coyote tells stories where she is the catalyst (she would say ‘star‘). I am not only native, I am also black, and to addresses the impossibility of the intersection of blackness and indianness I employ Coyote. Mapping Coyote Black invents the future through the past, reimagining and tricking you into seeing a new visual genealogy to disrupt the mainstream definition of Indian, a definition too limited for the complexity of Native lives.
Mapping Coyote Black is an installation that engages theories that challenge mainstream ideas of indigeneity, race and ethnicity; specifically lives, like my own, at the intersection of native and black. Native lives and black lives are often lived within racial intersections that remain hidden or unacknowledged for various reasons. This installation challenges assumptions about the limits of indigeneity and blackness and engages the viewer through mapping, refusal, desire, revenge, and haunting. My installation creates a new auto ethnographic narrative, a narrative mapping of untold histories that lends itself to new possible futures.”