This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition John Feodorov: Assimilations, curated by Ruba Katrib, on view at CUE Art Foundation from February 25 – March 31, 2021. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
John Feodorov, Collectibles #1, 2007. Archival giclée print, 30 x 24 inches.
You’re going, but it might be the wrong way. Black planes, birds, and brushstrokes travel out in all directions. Still, there is a feeling of being stuck, like you’ve paused on a back road trying to decipher an upside down map. Horizons jump forward or out of the way. Houses emerge, and sometimes turn into gas pumps. Familiar pictures break the surface like intruding thoughts, only to recede behind wall upon wall of opaque paint. A patch of plastic grass. What’s left of a wing. Rainbows prove unreliable for navigation. It’s hard to tell which way is home.
The works that make up John Feodorov’s exhibition, Assimilations, capture the feeling of being caught in-between destinations—geographically, culturally, and ideologically. In the paintings and prints on view, he layers intuitive gestures in acrylic and ink over collaged family photographs, historical documents, found materials, or American tourist kitsch. Elsewhere in the gallery, he creates an altar-like space with religious books from his personal archives that simultaneously represent precious family keepsakes and the tools of colonial conversion. Across the exhibition, he combines diverse materials, and references possibly contradictory experiences, without letting things settle or become dogmatic. Some of the signs used are universal, like a flipped American flag, while other moments shift subtly in meaning depending on who is looking. The work feels bittersweet and almost funny, but in a way where you can’t be sure if the artist is laughing with you or at you. And on top of it all, or in spite of it, there is an obvious joy in the handling of pigments and the process of making.
John Feodorov (Diné/Euro-American) grew up in Southern California, spending summers with his grandparents on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. In his teenage years he became a Jehovah's Witness with his mother, but reformed when he left for school to pursue art. He received his BFA from California State University, and his MFA from Vermont College. He now lives in Washington with his family. He works in painting and assemblage, and often collaborates across disciplines, including printmaking, performance, writing, music, filmmaking, and other forms. He has been featured in the PBS series Art21, as well as in numerous publications, collections, and exhibitions at institutions like the Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, and the National Museum of the American Indian. In addition to his creative endeavors, John regularly serves on arts commissions and selection panels, curates community projects, and advocates for young artists.
After years of nearly crossing paths in the Seattle Native arts community, I met John (virtually) for the first time on a smoky day in September 2020. He was getting ready to teach the fall quarter at Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, and was generous with his answers to my many questions, like good teachers often are. We spoke about what he’s been working on, and his upcoming solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation in New York.
Asia Tail: How are you? Have the many things happening in 2020 impacted your practice at all?
John Feodorov: Surprisingly not much, except for forcing me to do more work because I can’t go anywhere. While I’ve been home, I bought several books to challenge myself—a nice, big de Kooning book, also some Kiefer, and I’m re-looking at my Rick Bartow book. I’ve tried to think more about the material, not to change my way of painting, but to put it at an equal consideration as the concept. That’s been fun. It reminds me why I love to paint.
AT: Great to hear. You’ve already mentioned a few, but I’m interested in your influences.
JF: I do like de Kooning from a certain period, but otherwise I’m not big on abstract expressionism. When I was young, my influences were Max Beckmann and Otto Dix. I’ve always liked Germans. Maybe because there was so much turmoil in Germany, and how artists were dealing with it through their work speaks to me. And of course in my mid-20s I got to know Jaune Quick–to–See Smith and James Luna. They became mentors and were early influences on my work, especially in how to express being Native. No one was doing that like them then. It was revolutionary.
AT: That sounds like such a pivotal moment. How did they impact you?
JF: James, he showed me how I could be Native without becoming a stereotype, or playing a part. I’ve always been hesitant to identify myself as a Navajo artist. I felt like I had no credibility as an urban Indian who was raised Christian. And back then, when I saw the work of earlier Native artists, not to dis them at all, but I just couldn’t identify with them. That world seemed foreign to me. I felt like the enemy, like an infiltrator. I still kind of feel that—it’s very much a theme behind the CUE show. But James Luna showed me that how I was feeling in my experience had validity, and that it could be an important perspective that wasn't necessarily out there at that time.
AT: You said that your CUE exhibition is focusing on some of these ideas, particularly assimilation?
JF: Yes, it’s a big topic. Assimilation certainly is part of the Native experience as we are increasingly coming from reservation lands into urban environments—my mother became a first generation settler in her own right when she left Navajo territory. As kids of that experience, how does that fuck us up? How do you succeed within the colonizing culture and not be seen as a traitor by your own people? It’s a complexity that is still going on. I don't know how that ever gets resolved. I guess the danger is that it is resolved. Then does the termination policy win? Do we become completely absorbed into the American fantasy? There is pressure to keep some sense of purity. And there is the racist part of the word purity, and then there is the cultural survival part of the word. Again I’m left questioning these constant dualities.
John Feodorov, I Cannot Speak My Mother’s Language, 2018. Acrylic, latex, collage, graphite, and wax crayon on wood panel, 55 x 33 inches.
AT: I mean, to be Native now feels almost more defined by all these questions than anything else.
JF: I guess that’s the thing, ultimately I’m questioning the political ramifications of not being white—not just in terms of skin color, but in outlook. What first got me interested in making this body of work was—well, obviously Trump—as well as the rise in unmasking nationalist racist tendencies worldwide. Even though the works in this exhibition are referencing my personal experience, my hope is that they are understood as being much broader than that. These issues of identity are at the heart of what's happening right now, in terms of backwards immigration policies, Brexit, and so on.
AT: Given the political reality you mention, with Covid and everything else, for me it’s been hard not to question the point of art-making lately. How do you balance what’s happening in the world with what’s happening in your studio?
JF: My work is certainly dealing with things that are political, but I don't see myself as an activist artist. As I tell my students, we are in a boat that’s leaking. A hole appears and water starts rushing in, and someone runs over to that hole to plug it; another hole appears and they run over, and another one, and another. At a certain point someone has to ask—why is this boat leaking? To me, that is the job of artists.
Being the visual wing of a propaganda machine is completely uninteresting to me. Maybe the artist has to be suspected by everyone, even the movements and ideologies they agree with. Another thing I tell my students: artists need to be like a flea on a dog. The goal is to not become the dog, but to make sure the dog never gets too comfortable.
AT: That makes sense to me. You mentioned that recently you’ve been focusing on your materials. What does your process look like?
JF: I do some conceptual planning, but the paintings have to be almost completely improvised. I start by covering a wood panel with scanned pages from Pentacostal hymn books in the Navajo language, or satellite images of New Mexico, where my mother grew up; then I react. I’m not consciously thinking of these contexts when painting, but I’m manipulating myself into subconsciously responding.
They are never completely calculated because that would just bore the hell out of me. So here's the thing: I also want to have fun when I paint. There are lots of more lucrative ways of not having fun. This isn't a completely intellectual process. I want to see what the paint does when I do this or that—it’s experimentation.
Even with the more conceptual series, they are fun for me in the development of the idea. But it's never about just making visual jokes. I need to feel like I can both laugh and cry at the same time. I want things to linger and fester.
AT: Well that seems like as good a place to leave it as any. Final thoughts?
JF: I can have all these intentions and ideas, but they are useless once the work is done. Once it’s out there, it is either going to do its job or not. And the viewer is either going to do their job or not, because they have a responsibility, too.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Asia Tail is an artist, curator, and organizer based in Seattle, Washington. She is a co-founder of yəhaw̓, an Indigenous artist collective, and works as a creative consultant with various organizations locally and nationally. Asia is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and a proud member of the diverse urban Native community in the Pacific Northwest.
Mentor Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places. She is currently editing two forthcoming volumes, Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018, and is co-curator of the upcoming retrospective of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, which will open in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum.