Natalie King (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, facilitator, and member of Timiskaming First Nation. Her arts practice spans painting, video, sculpture, installation, community engagement, curation, and arts administration. Rooted in care, King’s work speaks to cultural survival, memory, kinship, and the radiant cycles of life and death.
Often depicting queer and Two-Spirit kin, King’s works embrace the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the Anishinaabe experience. King's practice operates from a firmly critical, anti-colonial, non-oppressive, and future-bound perspective — reclaiming lived realities through frameworks of desire and survivance. Her paintings act as sites of sensual memory, protection, and reclamation — bridging land and body, tradition and futurity. Drawing from Anishinaabe teachings, kinship structures, and symbols of body and land, King enacts a visual language that is intimate and ever-shifting, holding joy, grief, and transformation in equal measure.
King’s recent exhibitions include POWER at ONSITE Gallery (2024), World-builders, Shape-shifters at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2024), Come and Get Your Love at Arsenal Contemporary (2022), Proud Joy at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022), Bursting with Love at Harbourfront Centre (2021), and PAGEANT, curated by Ryan Rice at Centre[3] (2021). She has an active mural practice, including a permanent mural at the Art Gallery of Burlington, and has public commissions for Nuit Blanche, The Bentway, and Downsview Park.
Her work has been widely exhibited across Turtle Island, with solo exhibitions at the Temiskaming Art Gallery, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, Banff Centre and Arsenal Contemporary. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2018), and her works are held in the permanent collections of McMaster University and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.
Photo: Rita Taylor