Available now from Miniature Garden Publications–UTILITY SUITE: a book of cut paper collages made by Natalie Beall between 2018–2021. Edition of 75.
Who Really Cares? at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, July 7 – November 14, 2021
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz announces its annual juried exhibition, “Hudson Valley Artists: Who Really Cares?” will be curated by Helen Toomer, and it will feature a diverse group of more than twenty-five local artists, chosen from over 380 applications for the fourteenth annual Hudson Valley Artists exhibition.
It has been a year of reckoning, of questioning, of emotional and physical turmoil. We have been separated from, and confined with, our loved ones. This exhibition reflects a fractured year and the toll that both the minutiae and the monumental has had on us all.
This has been a challenging time. For many of us, an overwhelming amount of painful news was consumed and experienced from within our own homes, where the daily battle between being thankful for our health and angry at social injustices and isolation from loved ones, has challenged our mental health.
The pandemic, the fight for racial justice, the trappings of domesticity, the wonder of escapism, expressions of queerness and otherness, and gratitude for art are all present here. The artwork is almost all representational; you see figures, houses, people, places, things, animals and objects, striving to be present, seen, felt, and heard.
This exhibition is a snapshot of this time, intended to spark conversations, connect people, and provide moments of reflection and hope. So we ask you to stand still and listen to Marvin Gaye’s beautiful voice, his words, and ask yourself “Who Really Cares?”
Exhibiting artists: Sharon Bates | Natalie Baxter & Julia Norton | Sean Bayliss | Natalie Beall | Vernon M. Byron III | Randy Calderone | Maureen Drennan | Jen Dwyer | Echo Goff | Carl Grauer | Norman Magnusson | Katrina Majkut | Christopher E. Manning | Maeve McCool | Patrick Meagher | Paul Akira Miyamoto | Ocean Morisset | Liz Nielsen | Richard Pantell | Gina Randazzo | Ransome | Macon Reed | Marcy Rosewater | Kristen Schiele | Renee Stanko | Amelia Tolke & Andrea Miller | Karen Whitman
Untitled (Index of Function) prints featured in Chango & Co. Interior Design
It’s always fun to see my work out in the world.
Domestic Interiors: Virtual Exhibition at Stay Home Gallery
A re-nesting occurs as our nature inclines us to adapt quickly, we find ourselves turning our new cages back into the cozy homes we once loved. Rearranging, cleaning behind furniture, and noticing parts of our homes we haven't seen before, we both evolve and revert with this exercise as we find a new way to live by adopting an old one.
View works the exhibition here.
Utility Suite covered in Art New England Magazine
Art New England, September/October 2019
Utility Suite: Natalie Beall
Standard Space - Sharon, CT - standardspace.net - August 30–September 29, 2019
What are the interior lives of the furniture that we live with? Natalie Beall’s solo show, Utility Suite, at Standard Space offers a glimpse into an imagined world where objects move beyond their functionality. Beall mines thrift stores, antique shops and discarded curbside items around New York City and within her small town in upstate New York for items that form the springboard for her work. In the living room of her home, a glimmer on the edge of a heater grate caught her attention. Stripping away layers of paint, Beall unearthed its copper base. This grate became the subject of one of her reductive collages as well as a wall sculpture composed, in part, from gray felt floor pads. Both are included in Beall’s exhibition which also features around a dozen similar collages–all Untitled, sized roughly 25.4 x 19.5 inches, and vertical in orientation–alongside two other wall sculptures.
On Beall’s website, she includes examples of her source imagery, some of which have seemingly precise (often defunct) purposes such as a cast iron receipt spike or a shelf with a peculiar silhouette. Beall sketches these found objects, which she then transforms into portraits of unrecognizable, unnameable objects. She works with a limited palette of colored papers, subtle hues and neutral tones that recall those found in a stately interior decorating catalog. The furniture loses its usability and becomes flattened through the process of collage, yet the evidence of their former lives remains in Beall’s reimagined versions, detected in the netting, fasteners or hooks. This gesture–”transcendent and failing” as Beall described–embodies hopeful, humorous and deadpan overtones across these depictions of offbeat objects.
Growing up, Beall’s mother was crafty, sewing matching bedspreads and curtains in her childhood home. As Beall began her career as an artist, she often teetered between conflicting perceptions of purpose and decoration. Beall’s work advances abstracted versions of the things that inhabit the domestic realm. Her collages and sculptures, with their vestiges of utility, strike a balance between sophistication and accessibility and are at their strongest when they release a frisson of the uncanny.
-Jacquelyn Gleisner
"Utility Suite" opens at Standard Space on August 31
Please join me on August 31 from 5:30–8pm at Standard Space in Sharon, CT for the opening of my solo exhibition Utility Suite, comprising recent sculpture and collage.
Standard Space is pleased to present Utility Suite, an exhibition of new work by Natalie Beall.
Natalie Beall creates forms that are recognizable without being identifiable–reminiscent of everyday objects but not representative. Her translation of ordinary objects into abstracted collages and sculptures allow them to transcend their traditional roles, suggesting latent possibilities and unknown functions.
She develops her vocabulary of enigmatic forms from objects she finds in antique and thrift stores, on the street, and in her own home. The color schemes of her cut-paper collages are cohesive but not muted: navy blue, brown, taupe, ochre, and forest green, with orange, pale blue, and touches of red. Bold forms are balanced with delicate details of chain, netting, and woven strands. In related sculptures, gray felt rug pads are repurposed and combined with window screen, wood, and clay into wall-hanging forms evoking utilitarian objects.
Natalie Beall earned her BFA from the University of Georgia and her MFA from Columbia University. She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts/New York State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts in 2017 and a Lighthouse Works Fellowship in 2014. Beall’s work has been exhibited at multiple venues, including the Wassaic Project, The Lower East Side Printshop, and The Cooper Union. She lives and works in Salt Point, New York.
Elementary school workshop with Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon
On June 4, I will lead a hands-on collage workshop with elementary school students at Walter B. Howard Elementary in conjunction with Amie Cunat’s artist residency at the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon. Students will learn about the Shakers and use cut paper to recreate objects from the museum’s collection.
Collograph prints on Uprise Art
Selected collograph prints from my 2016 series Index of Function (Traces) are now available for purchase through Uprise Art. Included with each image is a quote revealing elements of my process.
“Although I don’t think of these images as symbols, I do think that together they begin to form a kind of enigmatic vocabulary. I like to think of these images hanging on a wall in groups, holding latent energy.”
Natalie Beall + Uprise Art
Selected collages are now available on Uprise Art. Read a Q & A with me in the Uprise Journal here.
2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts
A huge thank you to the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the participating panelists for awarding me a 2017 Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. Read more about the fellowship here.
Black Cat Journal, Spring 2017 Issue
Please check out the current issue of Black Cat Journal, featuring a piece I wrote on moving from NYC to the Hudson Valley titled The Decoration of Houses. Thanks to the editors for inviting me to contribute!
Endurance reading of The Testimonies of Mother Ann Lee @ Basilica Hudson
I will be participating in an endurance reading of The Testimonies of Mother Ann Lee, organized by the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon at the 24 Hour Drone, Basilica Hudson. The reading will take place on Saturday, April 29 from 2–10pm.
Vagabond Time Killers at The Wassaic Project opens May 20
I will be showing two collages in the upcoming group exhibition Vagabond Time Killers at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. The exhibition opens May 20 at 5pm and is the same day as the Wassaic Project's annual spring festival.
Release party 3/24: Witch, Beast, Goddess, Demon Slayer, You
Witch, Beast, Goddess, Demon Slayer, YOU premieres at LA Art Book Fair
Witch, Beast, Goddess, Demon Slayer, YOU, published by Miniature Garden, premiered at the LA Art Book Fair this weekend. Featuring works by Patricia Valencia, Natalie Beall, Denise Schatz, Jamie Kim, Cory Siegler, Claudia Peña Salinas, Ariel Dill, Anna Dare De Los Reyes, Christina Martinelli, Sharela Bonfield, Robin Cameron, Gretchen Scherer, Valerie Piraino, Esperanza Mayobre, Antonia Perez and Casey Cook.
"Light Moves, Haunted Histories" Presentation at CAA Conference
On February 17, I will co-present at the 2017 College Art Association conference with artist and PhD candidate Catherine Czacki. The presentation, titled "Light Moves, Haunted Histories", will "investigate non-dominating (dis-possessive) arrangements of artistic and critical practice––as well as ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ approaches to thought in the realm of the small gesture. Catherine Czacki and Natalie Beall will introduce ideas about how objects resist or refuse interpretation and/or alternately reveal traces of their histories. This serves as a continuation to their conversation published in Possible Press––though with an open format for a more public dialogue. The original project consisted of image and text exchanges between the two artists on topics ranging from Walter Benjamin’s notions of the everyday, Jimmie Durham’s poetry about intrinsic material value, domestic materiality and the hauntings that emerge via the utility object rendered useless. The conversation will include images/objects relevant to Beall and Czacki’s practices."
Index of Form at the NY Art Book Fair
I will be signing copies of my new book, Index of Form, at the Miniature Garden table at the New York Art Book Fair.
Friday, September 16 from 4–5pm
Studio relocation
In August I moved my studio from Brooklyn, NY to Salt Point, NY in the Hudson Valley, about two hours north of NYC.
The Lives of Forms at the Lower East Side Printshop
The Lives of Forms
Curated by Ksenia Nouril
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6-8pm
Lower East Side Printshop; 306 W. 37th St., 6th Floor
On view May 26 - August 26, 2016
This exhibition meditates on the tensions between figurative and abstract forms in the works of ten contemporary printmakers. The artists featured cull their forms from a variety of sources, from newspapers and magazines to high school yearbooks and personal archives. Old and new, popular and erudite, anonymous and recognizable, the multifarious forms that populate these works tell stories that have both local and global reach.
The title of this exhibition is inspired by La vie des forms or The Life of Forms in Art, a 1934 publication by French art historian Henri Focillon, one of the most prolific and poetic writers on the subject. It describes the ways forms make themselves known to us, revealing their meanings while constantly changing with the world around them. "We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above [hu]man[s]. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind."
Featuring work by:
Michael Adno
Silvina Arismendi
Natalie Beall
Alina Bliumis
Andrea Cauthen
Nina Feigin
Cooper Holoweski
Lindsay Packer
Felix Plaza