Mountains and HOV lanes: New MAC exhibit celebrates artist Joe Feddersen, a Colville tribal member who incorporates world around him

It is a delight to hunt for the urban symbols that artist Joe Feddersen embeds in his woven baskets, prints, ceramics and glassworks. A seemingly abstract geometric pattern may appear as a traditional Native American design, but closer inspection reveals the contemporary imagery of tire tracks or a high voltage metal tower. Like deer tracks or bear claw impressions, both images or patterns are the result of changes or impacts by living organisms to the ancient landscape.

Feddersen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, said his art is like that of the legend of the cedar tree that teaches a weaver how to decorate her baskets. The weaver is sitting under the tree and crying because she doesn’t know how to decorate her baskets, so the tree directs her to walk in nature and use what she sees. Mountains became a row of geometric triangles. Flying geese became a staggered pattern of V’s.

“The tree says to decorate the basket with abstractions of the world around you, and I think that’s what I do,” Feddersen said. “I look around and I incorporate the world around me in my artwork.”

Of course, Feddersen’s twist lies in what he chooses to incorporate. In some of his celebrated pieces, a closer look reveals that the pretty patterns are actually traffic control diagrams, such as parking lots and HOV lanes. The genius of the artist lies in the establishment of his own vernacular, a visual language in the tradition of the cultural practices of his own Plateau community and tribe.

Feddersen’s portfolio of thought-provoking pieces has made him a nationally recognized American artist. Just last week, Fedderson was announced as the winner of the 2024 Governor’s Arts and Heritage Individual Artist Award. His works can be found in major collections across the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Museum of Glass in Tacoma, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem.

Audiences will have the opportunity to discover Feddersen’s unique iconography themselves as they wander through the Northwest Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, “Earth, Wind, and Sky,” which opened Saturday. The retrospective features more than 120 works produced by Feddersen during the past 40 years. The show itself is organized into three sections (earth, wind and sky) in the MAC’s exhibit spaces, dividing dozens of high-flying prints, a mountain of baskets and a river of sculptures that all combine to form their own unique landscape of an artist’s life’s work. Throughout the different mediums, and stories told, it is apparent that Feddersen’s relationship to his Plateau region and his Interior Salish culture are intertwined inextricably throughout the show, his art and the landscape of his life.

In the catalogue published by the museum to accompany the exhibition, heather ahtone, director of curatorial affairs at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, called Feddersen’s baskets “a breakthrough” for the artist.

“This (visual language) was important for his relationship to the landscape and his definitions of home,” ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw) wrote.

Most Western art observers would picture a landscape as a painting of a nature scene like a mountain or lake, bisected with a horizon line separating earth from sky. But Feddersen, 71, one of the nation’s most influential living Native artists, has spent more than four decades drawing on his Indigenous aesthetic and his urban surroundings to interpret the world in fresh and exciting ways, and through innovative methods.

In Feddersen’s world, landscapes include self-invented, contemporary iconography from his native North Central Plateau region, where symbols of coyote and eagle – and sometimes geometric representations of himself wearing his wide-brimmed hat – dance next to petroglyphs representing the microscopic coronavirus or the massive high-voltage towers that dot our current Pacific Northwest terrain. In a series of prints, Feddersen makes a meditation of the landscape, presenting its complex geological layers, sediment deposits that have built up over millennia, marking forever the land and changing its colors and textures. His landscapes are sometimes ceramic sculptures of fishing journeys, boat rides with friends and canoe trips through troubling histories.

What makes Feddersen’s artistic vision so arresting is his melding of 21st century life with his love for traditional Plateau crafts and culture. His mother was Okanagan and Lakes from Penticton, British Columbia, and his father was the son of German immigrants. Even as a boy, Feddersen was always interested in art. As soon as he could swing a hammer, he liked to make things from the leftover wood his father would bring home from his job as a sawyer at the local lumber mill.

But growing up, he never thought art could be his path. “Things were different back then in the ’60s… I grew up in a really small town. You don’t really understand the national scenery,” Fedderson said. “You’re stuck … I didn’t really know you could be an artist.”

But he changed his landscape, again and again. After working a full-time job for seven years as a hydro mechanic on dams, Feddersen gave up his union job and benefits to move from tiny Omak, Washington, to Seattle to pursue a BFA at the University of Washington. He later took a job at Evergreen State College in Olympia, where he taught art for 20 years. In recent years he returned to Omak to keep making art.

“(Feddersen) has such a deep love for his home landscape and his home communities, whether they’re his tribal community or the community of eagles or the praying mantis that meets him on his doorstep in the morning,” MAC Special Projects Curator Rachel Allen said. “There’s a really intense love for the land, and I think you will find some subtle critiques that helps reveal to us things we should maybe notice.”

Despite the surprising modern elements and humorous signposts marking ancient spaces in his art, Feddersen’s works never feel forced or overly clever. He likens his creative approach to a simple breathing technique a friend taught him decades ago.

“Glen Alps, (a printmaker and former University of Washington professor), did this wonderful lecture … He talked about how you go to a doctor, and they tell you to inhale and exhale, and then from there, they tell you to breathe naturally,” Fedderson said. “And when I look at my art, I try to let my culture and my ideas flow that way. So it’s just natural; it’s not contrived or overthought.”

Co-curator ahtone wrote that Feddersen’s art is a way to get audiences to see that viewing one’s own cultural relationship to the earth through a non-Western lens can provide us with a fresh perspective.

“If Joe Feddersen has taught us anything through his art,” ahtone wrote, “it is to breathe and look closely.”