Natalie King: Built, Not Inherited

APR 3 >> JUN 21, 2026

Built, Not Inherited is the debut solo exhibition in Thunder Bay by artist Natalie King, a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, facilitator, and member of Timiskaming First Nation. Across painting and installation, King’s works function as places of passage rather than fixed objects. Her figures are states of becoming; eyes bright, hands open, and limbs embracing. Bold and vibrant, her canvases, sometimes bursting beyond the frame, examine how the body is held, protected, refused, and repaired in relationship over time. For King, love, care and responsibility materialize not simply as a feeling or expression, but as a form of decision-making, action, and labour.

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Artist Biography

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, murals, 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 queer Anishinaabe experience. Bright and bursting beyond the frame, her paintings act as sites of sensual memory, protection, and reclamation.

King’s work has been widely exhibited across Turtle Island, including recent solo exhibitions at the Galerie-Nouvel Ontario, Sudbury, Ontario; Temiskaming Art Gallery, Haileybury, Ontario; Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, M’Chineeging First Nation; the Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, and Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto, ON. Public art commissions include the Art Gallery of Burlington, Nuit Blanche, The Bentway, Downsview Park and the WNBA. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2018). Her work is in the permanent collection of McMaster University and the Doris McCarthy Gallery. This is her first exhibition in Thunder Bay.