Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky
Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA - To Jan 5, 2025
This 40-year retrospective gathers together more than 120 works by Joe Feddersen (b. 1953, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation), a prolific artist known for his prints, glass-blown objects, weavings and ceramics. Ranging from miniatures to wall-sized installations, Feddersen’s artworks are inspired by the signs, symbols and forms of the natural world and the world we, as human beings, have made of it. Feddersen often juxtaposes these worlds to humorous and/or poignant effect.
Among his most resonant smaller works is Stripes (2021), a blown-glass masterpiece 11.5 inches high, whose earth-, water- and sky-colored, horizontal and diagonal stripe pattern suggests a weave, but a nonutilitarian one. What Feddersen offers is not a basket that won’t hold water, but a vase that could if it weren’t in the service of something higher—as an artwork or a viewfinder, a visioning machine that provides a between-the-stripes view to the other side of itself, where together stripes align, achieve overtone, transcend.
Co-curated by Rachel C. Allen (Nimiipuu [Nez Perce]), curator of special projects at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation), director of curatorial affairs at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, the exhibition is accompanied by a 200-page illustrated catalog published by the museum and distributed by the University of Washington Press. Contributors include ahtone, Allen, Anya Montiel, and past collaborators of the artist represented by a selection of poetry.
Major support for Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
