Feddersen (b. 1953, Omak, WA) emerged in the 1980s as part of a new generation of Indigenous artists along with colleagues such as Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, Truman Lowe, Kay WalkingStick, and James Lavadour. Their generation was bolstered by a new found sense of unity and agency with grass-roots Native-run alternative spaces and community centers cropping up across the country.

Feddersen started out as a printmaker, his major at the University of Washington where he earned his B.F.A. While still grounded in printmaking’s layered imagery and processes, his repertoire has expanded to painting, photography, large-scale multi-media installations, collage, glass, and basket weaving. Throughout, Feddersen’s work explores his experiences in the world he inhabits as a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, a lineage grounded in the northern region of the historic Plateau territory. His work combines traditional Plateau imagery and techniques with references to the present day; geometric designs and motifs—mountains, elk, canoes, and petroglyphs—merge with geometries of the modern West—computer game animations, electrical towers, hard-edge abstraction, and graffiti. Feddersen’s work weaves its way through Indigenous thought and visual heritage, settler histories, and contemporary American art and culture.

Since completing his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989, Feddersen has regularly exhibited both regionally and nationally. Concurrently, until 2009, he taught at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where he is now Emeritus Faculty. In 2023, Feddersen’s work was featured at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA. A major retrospective of Feddersen’s work opened at the Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, WA, at the end of September 2024. The exhibition, titled, “Earth, Water, Sky”, features 120 works created throughout his 45 year career. Additionally, Feddersen received the 2024 Governor’s Award.

Feddersen’s work appears in numerous private, corporate and museum collections including the Seattle Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR, Facebook in Redmond, WA, the Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.