Natasha Sweeten was born in a college town in central Kentucky. The daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant, she recalls her youth as a constant navigation between belonging and being an outsider. During her high school years she moved to rural southern Indiana, where her first job was on a U-Pick-It farm sweeping oversized parking lots and leading schoolchildren on apple orchard tours. She studied painting, printmaking and sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later painting at Bard College, supporting herself by working at art galleries and as an assistant for several artists in New York City.
Sweeten considers her painting process an adventure in storytelling. When she paints she imagines the forms she uses as possessing distinct personalities that, in turn, become tools for working. She creates narratives by slogging through a forest of possibilities - some pursued, some abandoned and many a failure - while interweaving observations and current events so that each painting encapsulates a specific moment of her life.
Collaborations with fellow artists include painting, sculpture, collage, film, installation and a flag flying atop a roof in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 2024 she teamed up with the Ithaca-based architecture firm Ballman Khapalova to create an homage to Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting – and to celebrate its 50th anniversary –by cutting an upstate garage in half.
Her work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions and has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America and the Journal of Contemporary Painting, among others. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a PS 122 Space Fellowship, as well as artist residencies at MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Occasionally she curates exhibitions and writes reviews for the art blog Two Coats of Paint.
She lives and works in Columbia County, New York.
Contact:
natashasweetenstudio@gmail.com
Works on paper inquiries:
artsalesandresearch@gmail.com
Instagram:
@natashasweeten