About

Natalie Novak is an artist and educator from Cary, IL, currently living and working in Green Bay, WI. She received her BFA in Art Education with a minor in Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020. She received her MFA in Studio Art (Painting and Drawing) and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida in 2023. Recent exhibitions include Cute Aggression at Good Year Arts in Charlotte, NC, Between You and I at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, MA, and Word of Mouth at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL. In 2021, Novak’s work was included in Third Iris and The Huts Magazine publications. She is a recipient of the Windgate University Fellowship, Grinter Fellowship, and Graduate Teaching Assistantship.

Novak’s work explores themes of girlhood and the complexities of femininities through a hybridity of mediums and self-reflective processes. In her practice, Novak often calls upon her personal history as a dancer, current experiences, and feminist theory to confront patriarchal notions of femininity as well as the nature of setting ideals/expectations on the femme body. Novak is interested in the nuanced ways in which gender performativity- and socially constructed gendered practices- are engaged with in the everyday on both a personal and collective level.

Novak works between drawing, painting, fiber/textiles, and installations to create instances where the relationship between the “private” and “public” sense of self become complicated, abstracted, and contradictory. Within these conflations, Novak investigates the potential for re-imagining ideas of female representation, bodily autonomy, and agency.