JOE FEDDERSEN VITAL SIGNS JOE FEDDERSEN VITAL SIGNS Rebecca J. Dobkins With contributions by Barbara Earl Thomas Gail Tremblay Copyright © 2008 by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, and the University of Washington Press “Introduction” © 2008 by Barbara Earl Thomas CONTENTS “Joe Feddersen: Pulses and Patterns” © 2008 by Rebecca J. Dobkins “Speaking in a Language of Vital Signs” © 2008 by Gail Tremblay All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information stor - age or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Hallie Ford Museum of Art Willamette University PREFACE 900 State Street Salem, OR 97301 John Olbrantz www.willamette.edu/museum_of_art/index.htm 9 University of Washington Press PO Box 50096 Seattle, WA 98145-5096, USA INTRODUCTION www.washington.edu/uwpress Barbara Earl Thomas Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 13 Dobkins, Rebecca J. Joe Feddersen : vital signs / Rebecca J. Dobkins, Barbara Earl Thomas, and Gail Tremblay. — 1st ed. JOE FEDDERSEN: PULSES AND PATTERNS p. cm. — (Jacob Lawrence series on American artists) Includes bibliographical references. Rebecca J. Dobkins ISBN 978-0-295-98860-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feddersen, Joe, 1958– —Themes, motives. I. Thomas, Barbara Earl, 1948– 17 II. Tremblay, Gail. III. Feddersen, Joe, 1958– IV. Hallie Ford Museum of Art. V. Title. N6537.F36D63 2008 SPEAKING IN A LANGUAGE OF VITAL SIGNS 709.2—dc22 2008016223 Gail Tremblay 35 ISBN 978-0-295-98860-3 Printed in Canada PLATES Front cover: Okanagan II (detail), 2002. siligraph, relief stencil; 53 84 panels, 15 ½ x 15 ½ in. each; 93 x 217 in. overall Collection of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana Frontispiece: Joe Feddersen, 2007. Photograph by Mary Randlett. ©Mary Randlett ARTIST HISTORY 117 Back cover: Stealth , 2006. blown glass, sandblasted; 10 x 15 ½ x 15 ½ in. Collection of Arlene and Harold Schnitzer, Portland, Oregon Designed by Phil Kovacevich SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Copyedited by Laura Iwasaki Photography (unless otherwise noted) by Bill Bachhuber, pp. 27, 47, 50, 75–83, 86–102, 115; 123 Rebekah Johnson, pp. 8, 11, 25, 28, 40, 45, 54–66, 74, 84, 85, 103; Frank Miller, front cover, pp. 12, 16, 21, 23, 31–34, 36, 39, 42, 46, back cover; Richard Nicol, pp. 67–69; Michael Ryan, pp. 104–113; Susan Seubert, pp. 70–73 GLOSSARY OF PRINTMAKING TERMS The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National 126 Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. JOE FEDDERSEN: PULSES AND PATTERNS Rebecca J. Dobkins , the pulses and patterns of the When asked what his work is about, Feddersen body, are indicators of essential life functions. Joe says it is about inquiry—being curious, pursuing Feddersen’s work speaks to the relationship of questions. Like a scientist or the mathematician body and earth and the patterns that have he once thought he might be, Feddersen is imagi - emerged from this relationship. He has said that natively methodical. Intrigued by signs, he sets off his work “deals with the importance of how peo - on investigations of landmarks, artifacts, and ple respond to their environment, often embed - urban place markers. His inquiry is rooted in ding in simple pattern the innate connection to place and time. place.” 1 His Plateau ancestors “spoke to the land in the patterns of the baskets,” and today contempo - Joseph Feddersen was born in 1953, in Omak, rary designs continue to speak to the land, even as Washington, on the border of the Colville Indian the earth has been transformed by industrializa - Reservation, the third of six children. His mother, tion. Patterns, as Feddersen understands them, are Jeanie Alex, was Okanagan 2 and Lakes from abstracted forms of nature, pulsing through our Penticton, B.C., Canada, and his father, Ted lives, a language for our connection to place. Feddersen, was the son of German immigrants. Memory V 1992 Monoprint 30 x 22 in. Collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, gift of the artist Near the Colville Indian Reservation, Washington, 2007. Photograph by Joe Feddersen. 16 17 magazines that came to the Feddersen home reproduced the work of Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005) and T. C. Cannon (Caddo-Kiowa, 1946–1978), and in those pages, Feddersen glimpsed what was happening in the nascent con - temporary Native American art world of the 1960s. Scholder was famous for his use of Pop Art and Expressionism to depict the contemporary American Indian and destabilize the romanticized image of the noble savage. Cannon, Scholder’s student at the Institute of American Indian Arts, similarly employed modernism in his satirical portraits, which became part of the discourse of Native radicalism in the 1960s and early 1970s. 3 Feddersen children, Christmas, ca. 1957. Left to right: Antony, Timothy, Vicky (front), Yvonne, and Feddersen graduated from Omak High School in Joe. Photograph by Ted Feddersen 1971 and applied to Wenatchee Valley College in border. Contemporary tribal affiliations—such as Wenatchee, Washington. He wanted to study art View from Omak, Washington, 2007. Photograph by Joe Feddersen. the Feddersen family’s enrollment in the but had decided that he would study math if the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation— art program was full. Math was appealing Feddersen points out that both his parents had a the ancestral homeland of the twelve bands that are a result of imposed bureaucratic divisions because, like art, it involves investigation and sys - mother tongue other than English and related make up the Colville Confederated Tribes. The rather than pre-contact social and cultural associ - tematic research. Fortunately, the art program throughout their lives to their families and com - traditional territory of Feddersen’s mother’s ations. Feddersen grew up traveling the region had room for Feddersen and was staffed by teach - munities of origin, even while creating a geo - people spanned the present-day U.S.-Canadian with his family to camp, hunt, and fish and to visit ers who would prove to be highly influential. graphical center in the family home in Omak, a relatives across the reservation and in Canada. town with a majority non-Indian population. Ted Feddersen worked in a lumber mill in Omak, and According to Feddersen, everyone in his family Jeanie Alex Feddersen worked full-time raising made things with their hands. From an early age, the children. he tinkered and observed the results, and by the time he was in high school, he not only was taking The Colville Reservation, in northeastern art at school but had found a job in a ceramics Washington State, encompasses nearly 1.5 million store in Omak, where he traded wages for dis - acres of lowland valleys and mountain forests in counted art supplies. The shop owner, H. H. Hall, the heart of the Columbia River and Okanogan encouraged Feddersen’s experimentation, allow - River basin systems. Grand Coulee Dam, at the ing the student time and resources to engage his southwestern edge of the reservation, has had a imagination. Although the message Feddersen got profound effect on reservation topography; it is in his high school art classes was that representa - the largest of dozens of dams that have trans - tional art was the only “true” art, he had leanings formed the salmon-rich runs of the Columbia toward abstraction. He had few links with the art River and its tributaries since the early twentieth Joe Feddersen at an exhibition of his work at the Omak Jeanie and Lucille Alex, Feddersen’s mother and maternal world outside Omak, but the Arizona Highways library, 1972. Family photograph century. The reservation represents a fraction of aunt, ca. 1940. Family photograph. 18 19 fits. Throughout his seven years as a hydro - were.” Alps used this anecdote to get his audience mechanic and hydromatic operator at the PUD, to think about the heightened sense of awareness Feddersen continued to take courses at Wenatchee artists and art students have when engaged in the Valley College, earning his associate’s degree in self-conscious pursuit of art education in school. 1979. Feddersen believes the lecture was intended to raise many questions in the minds of listeners: Is Ultimately, Feddersen chose the life of an artist the ideal for the artist to be in a heightened sense over a career with the PUD. During those of awareness most of the time, or to routinely years, He seems to have maintained a vision of return to “normal,” to have art flow naturally, like the future that fundamentally included art breath? making—and in 1979, he resigned from his job, GLEN ALPS took Graves’s advice, and went to the University of Blue, Green, Violet and Orange Along with Alps, other faculty at the University of Washington to study with Glen Alps. Although he 1955 Washington School of Art added important Lithograph 1 left behind the workaday world of hydropower 20 x 26 /2 in. dimensions to Feddersen’s training. Painter and operations, the visual world of the dam and its Collection of the artist, Lacey, Washington printmaker Michael Spafford (b. 1935), known surrounding high voltage towers (a common sight marks and emphasizing color, are visible in for his abstracted images inspired by classical Joe Feddersen with parents Jeannie and Ted, 1985. across the Northwest) was to appear later in his Feddersen’s prints, but clearly Alps’s legendary mythology, offered encouragement to Feddersen Family photograph. Urban Indian series of the 1990s and 2000s. “talks” were profoundly important to those who and other junior artists. Feddersen began the studied with him.