"Round Peg, Square Hole" opens at OyG Projects October 26

Ortega y Gasset Projects
Round Peg, Square Hole: 
Natalie Beall & Scott Vander Veen
Curated by Clare Britt and Leeza Meksin
October 26 through December 15, 2024

Opening Reception: 
Saturday, October 26th, 6-8 PM

Round Peg, Square Hole brings together the works of two Upstate New York artists: Natalie Beall and Scott Vander Veen, whose works form an exquisite conversation about utility, performance, gender and inventiveness, bringing to mind the philosophical ideas about the value and the queering of “use”, explored by the British-Australian theorist Sara Ahmed.

Natalie Beall creates wall hanging objects which are both paintings and sculptures that investigate functionality, domesticity and fantasy. She also creates paper collages that are precise and symmetrical, incorporating attributes of usefulness such as grids, hooks and holes. Together they reference a world of seemingly utilitarian objects that are unable or unwilling to perform as intended, and instead engage in a delicate and playful masquerade. Through transforming source imagery associated with the domestic while humorously reconfiguring it, Beall embraces a lineage of traditionally feminine and often overlooked artifacts that hold a psychic and emotional charge.

Scott Vander Veen’s multidisciplinary practice utilizes a wide array of materials such as wood, paper, clothing, latex, glue, grommets, plaster, rubber drain plugs, misappropriated text, zippers, and found photographs. For this show, the artist presents a series of screen-like, free-standing forms that eschew the conventional divide between decorative and useful. These materially omnivorous objects challenge our preconceived notions of how a painting or a sculpture might behave, suggesting that multivalence is not merely possible, but essential. Like Beall, Vander Veen is preoccupied with questions of utility in art, exploring how form directs function and how queering that function is an act of resistance and pleasure.

Women's Studio Workshop Residency

I am thrilled to be the September Artist in Residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. As a recipient of the Ora Schneider Regional Residency Grant, I have been working in their papermaking studio, exploring hand papermaking in depth for the first time.

Working with paper pulp at the Women’s Studio Workshop

OFF THE RECORD // Upstate Art Weekend 2024

OFF THE RECORD is an exhibition of art, books and records organized by Natalie Beall and Pierre Le Hors at Not Donuts. Taking cues from 1980s DIY culture—the heyday of mixtapes and fanzines—the exhibition seeks to draw connections among New York and Hudson Valley-based artists whose work has a kinship with sound and the printed page.

Each artist has been asked to contribute an artwork, a publication, and a record, to be displayed non-hierarchically on pegboard walls with site-specific hanging hardware designed by Natalie Beall. The included records will be played continuously for the duration of the show, and a printed zine serving as catalog will be available to the public. Participating artists include Natalie Beall, Katie Bell, Samantha Bittman, Elisa Lendvay, Joshua Marsh, CJ Matherne, Sean McCarthy, Brent Owens, Megan Pahmier, Eric Palgon, and Michelle Rosenberg.

July 18–28, 2024

Project space open Sat–Sun 11–6 and by appointment

Installation view of OFF THE RECORD featuring works by Megan Pahmier, Natalie Beall, Eric Palgon, and Samantha Bittman.

Group Exhibition in LA

The exhibition finds its home in a 1920s residence in the Hollywood Hills’ Beachwood Canyon, joining the city’s century-long and storied tradition of art galleries operating out of private houses.

Pepper Tree brings together seven artists who explore the intimate lives of household objects and domestic spaces in their work. The exhibition is titled after a letter written by the previous owners of 2841 Hollyridge Drive to the current resident, which includes a lengthy "In Memoriam" dedicated to a single California pepper tree that once stood on the property. The former owners reminisce about the many gatherings that took place under the tree’s shade, illustrating how memories accumulated in the home sometimes supersede current realities. In varying ways, each artist in Pepper Tree probes the spectral nature of the spaces and objects we live among every day.

Peer Review: Volume II Launches at NY Art Book Fair

I am delighted to be included in Peer Review, a journal featuring writing by artists about artists. The journal will be available for purchase at the NY Art Book Fair block party on Saturday, April 27, from 12–6pm. Participating artists include:

Aurora Andrews, Chelsey Pettyjohn, Gene Bird , Hannah Schutzengel, Jenn Smith, Jen Schoonmaker, Jodi Hays, Joseph Wilcox, Kate Rusek, Kathleen Granados, Maggie Barrett, Mira Dayal, Molly Burt-Westvig, Natalie Beall, Noémie Jennifer Bonnet, Patrick Carlin Mohundro, Sarah Crofts, Yulia Katan, Josh Warren, Matthew Shelley

It is edited by Corina Kirsch, Julia Baron, Danyel Ferrari, Priscilla Fusco, Robert Silva and Kat Chamberlin with design and layout by Alexandra Hammond.

Choose This Now: Four Educators on their Artistic Practices and the Museum

On the occasion of the publication of AFAM Senior Educator Nicole Haroutunian’s novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, she will be joined for a virtual conversation by current and former American Folk Art Museum educators Claudia Maturell, Natalie Beall, and Sally Paul to share the intersections between their artistic practices, their own work, and the American Folk Art Museum’s collection.

This program is free, but registration is required. For more details or to register, please email: education@folkartmuseum.org. 

Upstate Art Weekend: "Appearances" at Strange Untried Project Space

Appearances

Upstate Art Weekend

July 22 - July 23, 2023 11 am - 6 pm

Strange Untried is pleased to announce our inaugural exhibition Appearances, co-organized by Adie Russell and Amy Talluto.

Featuring two and three dimensional work by six artists working in the Hudson Valley, Appearances embodies the mission of Strange Untried as a project seeking to connect artists through their work.

In his 1972 titular essay John Berger wrote “Appearances cohere within the mind as perceptions. The sight of any single thing or event entrains the sight of other things and events. To recognize an appearance requires the memory of other appearances. And these memories, often projected as expectations, continue to qualify the scene long after the stage of primary recognition.”

Berger asserts that what we perceive unites with both the data bank of our personal memories and our inherent sense of natural form, triggering affinities and associations which result in a kind of code or language. The selected artworks in this exhibition all skirt this boundary of recognition: Natalie Beall and Amy Talluto both create nonfunctional domestic objects that seem to no longer remember their use; Adie Russell creates charcoal drawings that explore erasure, loss and digital manipulation of historical photography; Judy Glantzman and Mandolyn Wilson Rosen both create representations of un-nameable faces in sculpture and assemblage, and Jesse Bransford creates color drawings of intangible phenomena inspired by his study of folk magic and the occult.

Live event: Saturday July 22 at 4 pm
Strange Untried will host a reading of “The Second Person,” a new work by poet Iris Cushing. The reading will last approximately 30 minutes.

Details:
This Strange Untried exhibition is a pop-up event located at Adie Russell’s studio in Lomontville, NY, 15 minutes south of Kingston. (The mailing address and google map address is Kingston, the hamlet is called Lomontville.) If coming from Hurley Mountain Road we are 1 mile up on your left in the white building behind the gray house. There is limited parking in the driveway. Please park there if possible. If not, you can park along the road.

The exhibition includes outdoor sculptures in a fairly flat grass landscape with the main entrance to the indoor space being at the upper level of a two level studio (6 steps.) There is an additional entrance on the lower level for those who would like to avoid stairs. Please reach out with any accessibility concerns.

Maake Magazine Issue 15 Interview

Check out my recent interview in Maake Magazine.

“I have an abiding interest in the quiet energy that objects contain, particularly in domestic spaces. In my research I look for objects that spark curiosity and hold latent energy, and I try to create that feeling in my work. Embedded within this fascination with objects is an interest in domestic space as the historical place where women have worked and created. ”

— Natalie Beall, Maake Magazine Issue 15

La Banda group exhibition @ Tappeto Volante, Brooklyn

La Banda, 2023
Group show curated by Tappeto Volante
Opening Tuesday, January 31, 2023, 6-9 pm
On view until March 19, 2023

With Eric Aho, Peter Acheson, Tomer Aluf, Liz Ainslie, Lisha Bai, Natalie Beall, Mildred Beltre, Timothy Bergstrom, Angela Conant, Vince Contarino, Jared Deery, Mary Finn, Marianne Gagnier, Benjamin Klein, Uwe Henneken, Eric Hibit, Volker Hüller, Alexandra Lakin, Leonora Loeb, JJ Manford, Monica Palma, Jesus Polanco, Padma Rajendran, Aparna Sarkar, Kim Sloane, Elisa Soliven, Jacqueline Shatz, Christine Stiver, Dominic Terlizzi, Zuriel Waters.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tappeto Volante
126 13th Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, 11215, New York
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Tappeto Volante founders, curator Paola Gallio and artists Jared Deery, JJ Manford, and Elisa Soliven are proud to announce the second edition of La Banda, 2023, an expansive group show of works on paper, paintings, and sculpture. 

For the second year, TV introduces works by 30 artists drawn from TV's founding artists' and curator's network of contacts, from family to friends and beyond. 

La Banda is a playful reference to a famous scene from the 1980 American musical comedy film The Blues Brothers, where the brothers have an epiphany and re-form their band to support their household.

Tappeto Volante (TV for short) opened in 2021 to help uplift and rebuild the community after the displacement following the Covid19 pandemic, and it has been a celebration of the resilience shown by creatives ever since. With TV's annual survey, each founder calls on artists who embrace the gallery's values of inclusivity and equality. 

La Banda is designed to celebrate and express gratitude for the continued support and engagement with TV's mission to provide a safe space for underrepresented artists, performers, and emerging curators bringing projects and productions to life. The show is a tribute to the Artists whom Tappeto Volante Projects has grown and walked with through the first 18 months of activitiy.

Lacing Post, 2022

2022's top spaces

My work was featured in Uprise Art’s 2022 top spaces. Here are three of my collages at Chief Los Angeles. Design by AvroKo and Jeffrey Miller Architecture.

Photo credit: Aubrie Pick

Pep Talks for Artists Interview

I was delighted to join Pep Talks for Artists host Amy Talluto for an interview recently:

“Collage artist and sculptor, Natalie Beall, joined me to chat about her work this week. We spoke about both her paper collage series "Utility Suite" and her painted wood and clay sculptures that tweak 2-D and 3-D space through a quiet visual flattening. Her mysterious images seem to represent game boards, domestic storage racks or display shelves that have long-lost their instructions and vital functions. Her palette is based on the muted tones of domestic interior paint chips and Canson Mi Teintes papers, and features soft oranges, browns, blues, greens, creams, grays and black.

Specific works mentioned: Utility Suite Series: "Rack" and "Rocker;" Sculptures: "Twisting Board," "Course," "Dormer," "Storage Solution (Tender Sling)," "Lacing Post" and "Pith-Peg (A Pastime)"

Mentions: Joseph Cornell's "Soap Bubble Set" 1942, Jim Gaylord, Canson Mi Teintes papers, The Shaker communities of Upstate NY, Saltonstall Artist-Writer Residency for artist-parents of NY state, Interlude Residency for artist-parents, Real Nifty Vintage youtube channel.

Natalie Beall's collage project, Utility Suite, is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.”

New collages available on Uprise Art

Three new collages from 2022 are now available on Uprise Art.

Arts Mid-Hudson Statewide Community Regrants Program

I was honored to receive a grant to fund my “Utility Suite” series this year. The Individual Artist Commission Grant provides support directly to selected individual artists for the creation of new work. This funding opportunity represents an investment in local artists. It is designed to increase artist initiated activities, enhance individual artistic career development, and foster creative interactions between an artist and a community.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.

White Rock Center For Sculptural Arts Summer Invitational

White Rock Center For Sculptural Arts Summer Invitational IV: Collage/Assemblage

Opening reception
Saturday August 6, 2022
3-6pm
Additional viewing day: Sunday August 7, 2022
11-5pm

Artists:

Natalie Beall
Vernon Byron
Melissa Dadourian
Jesse Gelaznik
Daniel Giordano
Gracelee Lawrence
Jennifer Macdonald
Rebecca McGee Tuck
Andrea McGinty
Gelah Penn
Mandolyn Rosen
Amy Talluto

This year, White Rock Center for Arts’ thematic Summer Invitational IV: Collage/Assemblage, invites artists to mount a temporary outdoor art installation that considers collage (associated with two-dimensional art forms) or assemblage (associated with three-dimensional art forms) in our contemporary moment. The impulse to collect and repurpose, to create new meanings from disparate elements is an infinitely renewable and inventive process that each artist in this exhibition explores in different and expansive ways. Traditionally, collage/assemblage involves a process of joining various materials from the ordinary and the commonplace. Although present in material culture across the globe since ancient times, in the early 20th century, combining fragments of found material into an artform was radical to the western art canon.

Diane Waldman writes:

“Throughout this [20th] century, collage has come to symbolize a revolution in the nature of making art. Collage has often emphasized concept over end product; it has steered the meaning of process; it has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary and given the uneventful, the commonplace, the ordinary a magic of its own”.

Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. New York: Harry N. Abrams Incorporated, 1992.

SHAPESHIFT at Fridman Gallery

SHAPESHIFT

July 30 - September 4, 2022

Fridman Gallery

Jill Baroff

Natalie Beall

Ellen Driscoll

Gordon Hall

Susan Meyer

Christina Tenaglia

475 MAIN STREET | BEACON

Opening Reception Saturday, July 30, 4-7pm

Utility Suite (Double Bell), 2022; paper and adhesive; 25 x 19.5 inches

Fridman Gallery is honored to announce SHAPESHIFT, an exhibition at its Beacon location gathering together new and recent work across media by artists living and working in the Hudson Valley.

What is at the edge of abstraction and representation? When we blur the line between these two points, what forms are possible? The works in this exhibition oscillate between being recognizable as functional objects and evading definition. The artists in SHAPESHIFT uncover new possibilities through deconstructing and recoding the various relationships among nature, architecture, and our bodies. 

Jill Barroff’s sculptures and works on paper create complex, diverse outcomes from the simple tasks of rearranging table tops, legs and corners, and cutting, folding and floating painted shapes. Often furniture-like and made from unexpected materials such as concrete, Gordon Hall uses materiality in abstracted floor-based sculptures to call their use and their potential user into question. 

Natalie Beall references toys, storage devices, grids, and hooks in her cut paper collages and mixed media sculptures, seeking to unleash the latent potential of the traditionally undervalued domestic sphere. Screwed directly into the wall, Christina Tenaglia’s sculptures made of wood, earthenware, and paint are untitled, focusing our attention on the presence of the objects, the relationships between them, and the spaces they inhabit. 

Ellen Driscoll’s works on paper incorporate ink, golf leaf, and silk, overlaying plant life and celestial bodies with architectural forms reflecting remediation, migration, and climate change. Susan Meyer’s brightly colored multi-faceted acrylic sculptures echo the psychedelic tones and architectural pursuits of utopian communities of the 1960s and 70s, exploring the tension between the environment and the manufactured world.

For press inquiries and images, please contact Hanna Gisel at hanna@hannagisel.com. For appointments and sales inquiries, please email info@fridmangallery.com or call +1 518 860 7937.

Odd Angles at Upstate Art Weekend

Please join Good Naked in Catskill NY
// THIS SATURDAY // July 23rd // 12 - 6 P //
for the opening of

ODD ANGLES
a group exhibition of work by

Peggy Ahwesh

Afruz Amighi

Natalie Beall

Jesse Bransford

Grayson Cox

Max Razdow

Alexander Ross

Keith Sanborn

Kiki Smith

Check out a preview of the exhibition here.

Pith-Peg (A Pastime), 2021, wood, epoxy clay, paint, foam clay, rope, 29 x 28 x 4 inches

Art Maze Magazine Issue 27

I’m elated to be included in Issue 27 of Art Maze Magazine, curated by Karen Hesse Flatow of Hesse Flatow Gallery. Visit Art Maze Magazine’s website for more information or to order a copy.

Saltonstall Foundation Fellowship

I’m thrilled to attend the Saltonstall Foundation artist residency in June. I will be living and making art in Ithaca, NY for one week as part of the foundation’s parent residency. More on the fellowship here.

That’s me on the top left in black and white! Photo credit: Pierre Le Hors

NYFA Hall of Fame Benefit

I am honored to participate in this year’s NYFA Hall of Fame Benefit which recognizes visual, literary, and performing artists who have received NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships and have had a profound impact on the arts through their creative work, and patrons of the arts who have championed the value of the arts in the world around us. I was the recipient of a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in 2017, and was pleased to donate the following collage to raise money for an organization I greatly admire. Bidding continues through April 7, 2022.

Untitled (Index of Form), 2014. Paper collage, 25.4 x 19.5 inches