Artist Joe Feddersen says one of his earliest memories is seeing his mother drawing pictures of horses at the dining table. Now 72, he remembers it vividly — walking down the long hallway, “in the morning, before breakfast,” and finding her depicting the image in her mind. The clarity of the scene still makes him smile.
It’s a memory whose themes have persisted across Feddersen’s 45-year career: home, family, land, local creatures and the dedication of time to art. Since then, he’s made countless artworks of his own, including prints, fused and blown glass, ceramics and woven baskets. All reveal, in diverse and abstract ways, the past and present landscape of his home.
Feddersen was born in the small town of Omak in northeastern Washington. His father was of German descent, and his mother’s heritage was Okanagan and Arrow Lakes — two of the 12 Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which spans 2.1 million acres. Half of Omak sits on reservation land, where Feddersen grew up swimming with friends at Omak Lake and traveling with family to visit Okanagan relatives across the U.S. border in Penticton, B.C.
In high school, his creative interest in making things led him to art classes and an afterschool job at an Omak ceramics studio. Not only did Feddersen get a discount on art supplies at the shop, he was invited to lead classes. “I was the little high school student that taught people how to paint ceramics,” he recalls.
When a clerical error postponed his entry to the University of Washington, Feddersen matriculated at Wenatchee Valley College — a plan B that proved to be pivotal. WVC had a strong art department, and Feddersen was mentored by notable artists — including print artist Robert Graves, whose expressive, abstract monotypes captured the feeling of Northwest landscapes.
Feddersen and Graves became lifelong friends. “For some reason, I seem to collect faculty,” he notes with a laugh. “They become like extended family.”
But the budding artist’s career was put on pause when in 1972 he left college after only one year to take what his elders told him was “the opportunity of a lifetime”: a position at the Public Utility District in the Wenatchee area. The job security and union benefits were too good to pass up, and soon Feddersen was racing up the ranks at the hydroelectric power plant as a hydromechanic and hydro operator. He stayed for seven years.
While there, Feddersen completed his AA degree at night — and still thought about art, which he decided to return to with guidance from Graves. In 1979, Feddersen left the PUD and entered the BFA program at the University of Washington. But those hydroelectric towers would stick in his mind and his art for decades.
At UW, Feddersen “collected” more lifelong faculty friends, including abstract painter Michael Spafford, whose paintings were inspired by classical myths, and print artist Glen Alps. The latter founded the printmaking department at UW, and was also known for naming and expanding the “collograph” technique, which involves layering varied textures onto a printing plate.
Layering textures and collaging iconography continue to be signatures of Feddersen’s work, including a new suite of 30 prints honoring the Colville Reservation’s recent acquisition of 30 buffalo. A gift from the nearby Kalispel Tribe, the buffalo add a keystone species to the landscape — and represent a cultural homecoming.
“These buffalo are part of our culture and part of our life,” Feddersen notes. “But we’ve been separated, and we have a whole ’nother history that’s gone on since they’ve been here.”
The print series — works he plans to pair with new poems by Colville poet Ramona Wilson — features glyph-style line drawings of buffalo layered with other symbols including deer, high-voltage towers, bear paws, even a spaceship. After the printing press, Feddersen adds stamps, paint and staples to some of the pieces. (Though he has studied many print techniques, he says, “I’ll never be accused of being a traditional printmaker.”)
His combinations of seemingly disparate imagery is intentional. “It’s poignant, because it talks about everything,” Feddersen says. “Our life and our culture is about everything. It’s about the past, but it interweaves everything with us today.”
The buffalo appear in fused-glass form as well, in Feddersen’s delicate and ever-shifting hanging glass installations. He started the fused-glass curtains about 10 years ago, creating individual glass glyphs — which he calls charms — depicting elk, cars, ferries and faces. Repeated across a wall, they look like a code or a message penned in invisible ink.
The concept combines charm bracelets, petroglyphs and wind chimes. Starting with simple sticks of clear glass, which he shapes, doubles and affixes with Elmer’s glue, then fires in a kiln, these ethereal works glint and make a gentle chiming sound, a reminder to pause and pay attention to the surrounding environment.
Another UW professor with whom Feddersen formed a strong bond was Vi Hilbert, the Upper Skagit elder and linguist dedicated to preserving the Lushootseed language. It was Hilbert who pinpointed Feddersen’s mission, telling him, “You’re not an artist, you’re a storyteller.” By that time Feddersen was clearly an artist, in multiple media, but to him Hilbert’s point was clear: “It’s the narrative that pulls it all together,” he says.
That ongoing narrative is rooted in the Okanagan landscape — how it once was and how it is now — and the people and animals who call it home.
After college, Feddersen’s art career took off in Seattle, and in 1987 he was invited to pursue an MFA in printmaking at another UW: the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he studied under exploratory artists such as Truman Lowe, a Ho-Chunk sculptor whose installations used natural materials to reflect contemporary Indigenous themes. Feddersen also worked with groundbreaking print artist Dean Meeker, who emphasized the importance of contemplation and process.
Grad school was also formative because it’s where Feddersen began experimenting with glass art, which he would return to decades later with his cascading glass glyphs.
In 1989, Feddersen returned to Washington and began what would be a 20-year teaching career at Evergreen State College. During this period he befriended fellow faculty such as contemporary weaver Gail Tremblay, and worked on his own abstract print series, Plateau Geometrics, based in the graphic design and color patterns traditionally found in Indigenous Plateau basketry.
In the process, he sought advice from weavers including Elizabeth Woody, a Navajo/Yakama poet/weaver who studied at Evergreen; and Elaine Timentwa Emerson, a Colville master weaver who taught him that basket designs mean different things depending on where you come from. (Long before, Feddersen had been Emerson’s paperboy.) Soon enough, Feddersen wanted to make his own meticulously woven baskets in the Plateau style.
“The idea was that they would have the traditional shape and the traditional way of weaving, but the iconography would be different,” Feddersen explains. “It would reference the patterns, but I didn’t want to copy the designs. Like one of them has a line going down with several horizontal lines. When you look at that, you think, ‘Gosh, that’s a really old pattern.’ But when you tell them that the name is Parking Lot, it becomes something totally different.”
Certain imagery repeats across across Feddersen’s glass art, prints, ceramics and basketry — like a story he is deliberately telling over and over, a kind of oral tradition shared visually. Reflecting the current landscape, birds, canoes and trees intermingle with ferries, televisions and traffic. In his waxed-linen baskets and ceramics, the symbols often merge, with human bodies whose heads have been replaced with TV sets, antlers, or space helmets.
Many icons speak of impact on the land, from parking-lot lines to tire tracks to trucks, all of which Feddersen cleverly turns into symbols that appear almost ancient. Layered together, the marks become a sentence; the sentence becomes a story.
And those high-voltage towers keep marching across the land. Feddersen says when they first started appearing on the local ridgelines, he thought of the frightening “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. He still does. “I think about the magician, and the brooms carrying two buckets on each side, and how that relates to these high-voltage towers — how they’re carrying our resources away … These projects are a big expense to our people.”
At this point in his career, Feddersen is wreathed in accolades: a 2025 Washington State Governor’s Award; a show at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery; an interview in the Smithsonian’s oral history archive; an expansive 2024 retrospective, held at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane and including an impressive exhibit catalogue, Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky.
But Feddersen maintains that it’s his community that’s most important to him. After all, he says, when he retired from teaching to focus on his art, “I didn’t move to New York City or anything, I moved home.” That move was also influenced by his Okanagan grandmother, who had urged him, “Come home and be with your people.”
His people include family like nieces Carly (a jeweler) and RYAN! (a multimedia artist), both successful artists in their own right. Friends and fellow members of the Colville Confederated Tribes include painter and art professor Michael Holloman and Native historian and Indigenous activist Randy Lewis. Add to these several members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, including printmaker Corwin “Corky” Claremont, beader and weaver Linda King, and renowned artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Feddersen’s close friend, who died earlier this year.
Living and making art in his hometown of Omak, Feddersen feels buoyed by his community — whether local or in the long arms of his artistic education. These influences are embedded deep inside his work, ideas layered upon one another over time like petroglyphs on a rock face. That’s why Feddersen believes building a creative community is crucial, he says. “The act of making things together, it’s really powerful.”
Catch up with the artists featured in the first season of Art by Northwest, and watch for new Season 2 episodes as they roll out in August, September and October, 2025.
Brangien Davis
