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Schneider Museum of Art hosts Native American artists By Jeffrey Gillespie for the Tidings Jan 23, 2020 01:01 PM A A The Schneider Museum of Art at Oregon Center for the Arts has opened its new exhibition of works by Joe Feddersen and Wendy Red Star, two Native American artists whose work deals, on their own terms, with misrepresentation of Native Americans from a historical through to a contemporary context. The exhibit is curated by Mack McFarland, the preeminent curator and cultural producer who has worked for the Pacific Northwest College of Art for 14 years in various capacities. His current role at the college is as Director of the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture. Joe Feddersen is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, living and working in Omak, Washington. He taught at the Evergreen State College in Washington for more than 20 years. His diverse body of work includes photography and collage self-portraits, geometric monoprints, sculpture, and Plateau-style basket weaving. He has also worked in glass. His major shows have included presentations of work at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The artist’s current body of work combines contemporary materials with Native iconography to create powerful and evocative images that explore the interrelationships between urban symbols and Indigenous landscapes. Feddersen is represented in Oregon by the Charles Froelick Gallery in Portland. Wendy Red Star is originally from Billings, Montana, and works primarily with photography, installation and sculpture. Of Crow and Irish decent, her work utilizes humor to address romanticized and popular representations of Native Americans, which she juxtaposes with authentic cultural and gender identities to give viewers a deeper appreciation and understanding of the indigenous experience. Educated at the Montana State University in Bozeman and at UCLA, she is the recipient of multiple awards and accolades including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2017 and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2018. In 2019 she had her first career survey exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. Red Star is a prominent advocate for the advancement of Native Americans in the art world, and particularly for Native American women. She has curated a number of significant exhibitions that have featured exclusively Native American artists in Seattle, Montana and elsewhere. Her work is included in the Smithsonian Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Portland Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum, among numerous others. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters Gallery in New York City, and she lives and works in Portland. Schneider Museum continues its mission to promotes an understanding of the visual arts as part of a liberal arts education. Serving both an academic and community audience, it attempts to build a challenging environment that engages with the visual arts through exhibitions and programs supporting interdisciplinary study, research, and discourse. “Two Generations: Joe Feddersen and Wendy Red Star” will be on display at the Schneider Museum of Art, 555 Indiana Street in Ashland, from Jan. 16 until March 14, 2020. photo courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of ArtWendy Red Star, "Winter" from the Four Seasons Series.