Judy Natal is a Chicago-based artist, Professor Emeritus of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, author of EarthWords, published in 2004 by Light Work, and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z, published in 2006 by Center for American Places. Her photographs are in permanent public and private collections of the California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil, among others. Her work has been exhibited at Projects International, Photograph Gallery and Jack Hanley Gallery in New York City, the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Travel Grant, Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowships, Polaroid grants and New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships.
Iceland, 2023
Natal has also been awarded many artist residencies nationally and internationally, in Iceland, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, the Faroe Islands, Hawai’i and the Biosphere 2, where she established an artist residency program to invite artists to create a cultural response to this man-made wonder of the world. In 2012, her project Future Perfect was established as a permanent archive at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, which houses the largest landscape photography collection in the world.
Since 1997, Natal’s work has explored the visual narratives posed by landscapes and human intervention to those landscapes. By 2006, her focus had progressively shifted toward her growing environmental concerns, interpreting landscapes that have been altered by humans: scientists, engineers, designers, and utopians. She has also ventured into the world of robotics to examine our complex relationship to machines built in our own image, which ultimately raises questions of what it means to be human. Her work continues to describe important aspects of our contemporary world and contribute significant questions and observations about mankind’s ideas of nature, the effects of the built environment on increasingly threatened and fragile landscapes, what the future might hold for us environmentally, and how we must move toward a more sustainable future.
Currently, Natal is working on an interactive immersive installation and book project The Weather Diaries. This is a creative non-fiction/speculative fiction work that weaves Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Hawai’i with archival images, video interviews of farmers, fisherman, scientists, environmental activists, and artists, music interludes, and craft, to celebrate traditional ecological knowledge.
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