On View:  January 16 – March 14, 2020

Two Generations:
Joe Feddersen &
Wendy Red Star

Exhibition Statement

This exhibition presents the work of two Northwest Indigenous artists who work across media and whose work responds, on their own terms, to historic and contemporary misrepresentations of Native Americans. Joe Feddersen, born in 1953, is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and has exhibited internationally since the early 1980’s. As a printmaker, basket maker, ceramicist and glass artist, Feddersen combines contemporary materials with Native iconography to create powerful and evocative works that explore the interrelationships between urban symbols and Indigenous landscapes.

Wendy Red Star, born in 1981, was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star incorporates and recasts her research through photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance, offering new and unexpected perspectives on past, present, and future life. Her work is humorous, surreal, and often abrasive, yet deeply rooted in a celebration for Crow life.

Joe Feddersen Bio:

Joe Feddersen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, lives and works in Omak, WA and was a faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA from 1989 until his retirement in 2009. His work was included in Weaving Past into Present: Experiments in Contemporary Native American Printmaking at the International Print Center, New York, Autumn 2015. He has been featured in numerous national exhibitions, including Continuum 12 Artists: Joe Feddersen, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution at the George Gustav Heye Center, New York, NY, curated by Truman Lowe; Land Mark, Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA; and was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition and monograph, Vital Signs, organized in conjunction with Froelick Gallery and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, OR

Wendy Red Star Bio:

Artist Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She served a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Dartmouth College, CalArts, Flagler College, and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs. In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2019 Red Star will have her first career survey exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark New Jersey.

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Curator Mack McFarland Bio:

Mack McFarland is a cultural producer and has worked as Curator for Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2006. Currently McFarland is the Director of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA. His exhibitions at PNCA have included commissioned projects of new works from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism.  He has also curated a review of Luc Tuymans’s printed works, a group exhibit marking the centennial of John Cage’s birth, and a comprehensive look at the process of the comic journalist Joe Sacco.  McFarland’s current question is how exhibitions and artworks can meaningfully link to our shared experience of existing together within the ongoing process of history.

CLICK HERE FOR ACCOMPANYING EXHIBITION BOOKLET, Curator Mack McFarland in conversion with RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen

CLICK HERE FOR NEWARK MUSEUM PUBLICATION ON WENDY RED STAR, Softcover 88 pages, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth

The Panel Talk Unsettling Territories, originally scheduled for March 12, 2020 and canceled due to COVID-19 has been reformatted to this available PDF.
You can view the Unsettling Territories panel talk here

Back to Upcoming Exhibitions

Curator

Mack McFarland

Artists

Joe Feddersen
Wendy Red Star