Everette Ball (b. 1983) is currently affiliated with Y.A.I. Arts (formerly H.A.I./Healing Arts Initiative), a creative studio that supports artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York City. Ball’s devotion to detail extends from his realistic landscape drawings to his fantastical paper mache sculptures. His primary subject is architecture – skyscrapers, bridges, amusement park rides, and freestanding sculptures. With patience and precision, Everette draws source images from his iPad in ink and colored pencil, leaving no brick, pipe, traffic light, or planter left behind. Subtle flourishes are as integral as signature features to a structure’s identity. He applies the same care to drawings of figure models, his grandmother, Venus Flytraps, “Sound of Music” posters, clowns, monsters, and other subjects.

Everette – who identifies as having a developmental disability – is a gifted world-builder, assembling a lexicon of expressions and visual tropes that are distinctly his. Spend time with Everette and you are sure to hear phrases like “The mouse is in the potatoes” and “There’s rainbow cake at the Plaza Hotel,” which invite you into his mind and appear peppered throughout his artwork like easter eggs. Everette’s humor and wild imagination are perfect foils to his methodical practice.