Volume Gallery announces Urban Drama, Joe Feddersen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening June 13, 2026, from 3 to 6 p.m.
Working across woven linen baskets, blown and fused glass, and printmaking, Joe Feddersen, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes based in Omak, Washington, brings together ancestral modalities with contemporary iconography to create work that reflects his lived experience. The multi-disciplinary artist speaks from a Plateau perspective—one that honors our inseparable connection with the landscape.
Feddersen’s visual language is exemplified by stylized outlines—abstractions of everyday figures rendered graphic, like signs. At first glance, his work might seem traditional, and in some ways, his approach is a continuation of ancestral artistic innovations, just as Plateau people wove slanted triangles to depict mountains or painted pictographs on stone, Feddersen uses the same economy of form to depict the scenery he observes today. Parking lots, power lines, and tire tracks appear alongside bear tracks, eagles, and snakes—each given equal visual weight, each acknowledged as a character in our environment. Nature and society are shown entwined—creating indexical and unromanticized portraits of the American landscape as it actually is, shaped by industrialization, land use, and ongoing human presence.
His precise linen baskets, a continuation of centuries-old Plateau “sally bag” designs, are renderings of our world—its conflicts, infrastructures, and ironies. Feddersen’s compositions are taken directly from the landscape: aerial views of parking lots, the sinuous path of a snake, the diamond geometry of high-voltage towers. The towers carry particular resonance for Feddersen, who understands them as monuments to dispossession—invasive structures on Indigenous land lost to bad-faith deals and flooding when dams were built. One recent basket, Wild Peaks, takes its name from an SUV tire brand, its tread abstracted into repetitive forms that read like a mountain range; the imagery’s double meaning is a wry commentary on the idealized vision of the American West that consumer culture sells back to us. Additional recent pieces show protesters and ICE agents, urgent depictions of ongoing conflict and resistance. Protesters drawn with heads of affinity animals document gatherings in the small town of Omak, the cast of characters acting as a pictorial record of a moment in history.
Feddersen’s glass vessels are blown and then sandblasted with the artist’s signature symbology—trucks, bicycles, and animals are layered over subtler, weaving-like patterns etched beneath. Feddersen’s large-scale Charmed glass installations combine several ideas: a petroglyph wall, a wind chime, and a charm bracelet. Hundreds of clear fused-glass pendants, ranging from four to ten inches each, hang suspended across the wall, casting shifting shadows that animate the space around them. Feddersen’s Charmed pieces portray a teeming crowd of moments from our surroundings, in this latest iteration, cars and trucks mingle with protesters and buffalo.
With a long-time background as a printmaker, Feddersen thinks in layers across his practice. His Urban Drama monoprints are painterly and energetic, incorporating spray paint and collage. High-voltage towers are reduced to pure geometry, explored through reversals of positive and negative space and Pop-like repetition. Feddersen’s decades of experience in the medium are evident in the assured, direct, and indirect application of color and labyrinthine pattern.
At the heart of Feddersen’s practice is a commitment to observing, documenting, and storytelling. Viewing making as an act of reciprocity with the earth, he documents a landscape shaped by history, industry, and survival. With a finely tuned sense of humor, his work reminds us that the marks we leave on the land are all part of the same ongoing story.
Urban Drama will be on view through July 25, 2026.
Joe 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 exhibited extensively both regionally and nationally. Until 2009, he taught at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, 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, Washington, and in 2024 he was included in the exhibition Implicit Explicit at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. A major retrospective of Feddersen’s work entitled Earth, Water, Sky opened at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, Washington in 2024, traveled to the High Desert Museum, Bend, Oregon, and will open September 2026 at the Missoula Art Museum, Montana. The exhibition features 120 works created throughout his 45-year career. Feddersen received the Governor’s Arts & Heritage Award for significant contributions to Washington State’s arts landscape or cultural heritage in 2024. Feddersen’s work appears in numerous institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, The Heard Museum, Phoenix, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
Photo: Mario Galucci