Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Artist and photographer Naomi Natale is the founding artist behind One Million Bones—a large-scale social arts practice that fuses education and hands-on artmaking to raise awareness of genocide—and the Artistic Director of The Art of Revolution, which uses art to transform public opinion and inspire social change. A TED Senior Fellow, Natale speaks on art and activism, and what one can do for the other.
Naomi Natale wants to bring people closer to the atrocities occurring near and far. As the founder and director of The Cradle Project, her first large scale installation, Natale called attention and raised funds for the 48 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 550 cradles were created and donated by artists from around the world who were drawn to Natale’s vision. With One Million Bones, Natale and her team collected 1,000,000 handmade bones created by individuals all over the world. In 2013, they installed them on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to bring attention to the victims of genocide. The short film about the project, also titled One Million Bones, can be found online.
Now the Artistic Director of The Art of Revolution, Natale is working to engage and educate the public, nurture artists and activists, and strengthen social justice movements through art. Her Rhetoric & Revolution program combines film and digital design, creating an arts-based, intermodal social practice that allows participants to understand critical social issues through the lens of famous, historical speeches. Her En la Luz project seeks to create a physical and virtual constellation of Chilean memory to address lingering pain and disconnection over the coup d’état of 1973 and the ensuing 17 years of dictatorship. It is described as a social art practice that uses education, storytelling, and public installation to release silence, spark a public dialogue, and share the experience of 1973 in a new light.
Natale has received numerous awards, including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artist as Activist Fellow for 2015 for her project in Chile, the prestigious TED Global Fellowship (2009), and the Professional Achievement Award from the School of Arts and Humanities at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (2009). Naomi has served as an artist-in-residence at Columbia College of Chicago in 2008, 2010, and 2011. She is currently a TED Senior Fellow and was a 2010 Carl Wilkens Fellow.