IN CONVERSATION

ASSIMILATIONS

An Interview with John Feodorov
By Elise Dean Wolf

John Feodorov is a multi-modal artist of Diné and Euro-American heritage based in Seattle, Washington. Over the past four decades, his art has critiqued incompatible visions of the Native American experience. Like a culturally promiscuous magpie, he has seized on American pop-culture tropes, layering found imagery, bold brushstrokes, and appropriated appropriations into the color-saturated abstractions of the Assimilations series. 

On a Monday morning in April, I found him sitting at his desk, with a Navajo rug his aunt wove hanging on the wall behind him. A cat occasionally wandered through the room as we spoke on Zoom. He expressed excitement and apprehension about his nearing retirement from Fairhaven College, where he has taught for the past twenty years. A generous, candid, and eager conversationalist, Feodorov spoke of his time as a Jehovah’s Witness, being a rock-and-roller, and making work from the perspective of an urban Indian.

What was your home life like when you were growing up?

J: I’m half Navajo and half white—Welsh, I think, even though my last name is Russian. It’s complicated. My stepfather was Russian. I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, in a town called Whittier. I never lived on the reservation, but my siblings, our mother, and I would travel to New Mexico where my grandparent's homestead is–just outside of the reservation boundaries, in an area called the Checkerboard, about thirty miles east of Chaco Canyon. We’d go there for vacations and bring clothing and things to spread around the relatives.

My mother converted to Jehovah's Witnesses the year after I was born, but she still taught me Navajo songs, and we would go to urban Natives’ events in LA. In Downey, another suburb, there was a Navajo club at a restaurant called Silver Saddle. Lots of Navajos would come and they would be dancing and singing and cooking. I remember they had a stagecoach in the back that I’d ride on. So my “Navajo-ness” was very urbanized—except for my connections to my grandparents’ homestead.

What did it feel like showing up there?

J: I usually say I know enough Navajo to not starve if I was on the reservation. I always felt like an outsider, I never felt Navajo enough, and I certainly never felt white enough at school. Being raised Jehovah’s Witness, a marginal Christian denomination, going to school and not doing the flag salute during the Cold War, and having a Russian name, and not celebrating Christmas, birthdays, or any of that—weird Jehovah's Witness worldviews—all these situations kind of threw me into not being anything enough.

But I would learn Navajo songs and dance at the Navajo club when I was little. We had Navajo things around the house, my mother would visit the Hopis, and she’d bring jewelry or something and trade for pottery. Things like that were very much an important part of my life until my very early twenties.

Did growing up around those art objects influence you?

J: Oh, yeah. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a fundamental part of my upbringing was having those objects around. I still have them around—rugs and other things. But at the time, I was just as influenced by pop culture, in terms of what being Indian meant, as I was by my Navajo family. There was a popular TV show on then, a parody of Westerns, that was a family favorite. The Indians were all played by Italians but it was a funny show. Some pop-culture depictions were extremely insulting and others not so much. For example, in the Lone Ranger show, Tonto was played by an actual Indian, Jay Silverheels. He was sort of like a hero—someone who was actually in Hollywood.

There is one painting with a TV and a landscape and the road, and then the Star Trek Enterprise ship in the sky. (My Life as a Suburban Ind'n)

J: That was a nod to another artist who’s an acquaintance of mine, Larry McNeil, who is a Tlingit Indian teaching at Boise State University and does a lot of things with Star Trek. On that same painting was a big portrait photograph of Iron Eyes Cody, probably the most famous fake Indian from Hollywood. He appeared in several movies and a famous TV commercial about pollution in the early seventies. He’d be standing at a river and seeing this pollution float by, and there was an extreme close-up of him shedding a tear, the crying Indian. We didn’t know he wasn’t Indian and I remember my mother met him once.

That stuff was really all I had. As a young person, I recognized that my real Indian family had nothing to do with these portrayals. It wasn’t like I thought that was real! That was just entertainment, and sometimes it was insulting, and other times it wasn’t as insulting.

When did you start making art?

J: I always kind of did it, from my earliest memories, but [as a teenager] I was much more interested in rock-and-roll than in being an artist. I wasn’t even thinking I would go to university, I didn’t think I was smart enough or had the money—my mother certainly didn’t have money to put me through college—and I didn’t know anything about grants or student loans. But then I took a life-drawing class at a community college because my girlfriend at the time was taking it. It turned out I became pretty good at drawing, so then I thought, “Ah! Maybe art.” I applied to Cal State Long Beach and was accepted into their art program.

What was your art college experience like?

J: I was pretty skeptical. I enjoyed making art but there was this side of me that didn’t buy into it, and another side that held these so-called geniuses up on a pedestal. I thought I had to paint like Titian before I could do something abstract or experimental. I didn’t even know what ‘experimental’ was!

In one class in the early eighties, the professor brought in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and I began reading Lucy Lippard and was introduced to the work of James Luna. Jaune and James showed me that art could be something connected to me. There were Native artists before, but they were doing very Native things, contextually Native things, that didn’t resonate with me. This whole time I didn’t feel like I was Indian enough, so, who am I to make Indian art, right? I didn’t want to pretend, wear Native garb and beads and whatever. I didn’t want to perform. Jaune and James showed me that Native art could be so much more.

Jaune supported me along the way, curating me into a couple of shows she was putting on. She told me that if I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, especially as a native artist, I had to go to grad school. This didn’t sit with me very well. I thought I couldn't afford that, and I still hadn’t bought into being a professional artist. I was still kind of a rock-and-roller.

But I started doing more conceptual work and left college without finishing. I moved to Santa Fe with Paul Amiel, a friend of mine from high school who is a musician, a composer—we both decided we had to get out of Whittier because it was too small. The work I began doing in Santa Fe wasn’t quite what I'm doing now, and I've trashed a lot since, but at the time it put me in this direction. Some of that work was in a group show in Santa Fe at the Center for Contemporary Art. It was great to be with some of those artists who I’d heard of. I was, like, Wow! Really!

Was that experience something that gave you belief in the possibility of art being a future?

J: Yeah! I still hadn’t found my footing, but that made a big difference. After that show, I finished my degree at Cal State, moved back to Santa Fe, did more there, then my wife and I got married and moved to Seattle. Seattle has been where I bloomed.

There’s a gallery here called Sacred Circle Gallery like nothing that I’d seen before. It was more contemporary, interesting Native work, including Jaune and James. They embraced me right away and offered me a solo show. I had never experienced that sort of thing. There were things I was fighting, too—silly expectations of what Native art was. I don’t feel like I'm battling so much anymore. The people that I deal with now in the arts community are much more sophisticated about what Native art is.

But I still feel that Seattle isn’t really home. I mean I've been here since ’92, but the native culture here is very different from what I'm used to, even as an urban Indian. So much of it is salmon, it’s water based.

Which isn’t what New Mexico is!

J: Yeah, which is not New Mexico! There are Navajos here, but I don’t feel connected to the Native population. I mean no one has been a jerk or anything, I’ve been welcomed, and have worked with several Native artists here, mostly Tlingits from Alaska. But culturally I don’t have the same sensibility, I mean if you threw me in the southwest, I wouldn’t have those sensibilities either! Maybe what makes me peculiar is that so much of my identity is based on being an urban Indian.

It's not that I’m whining, like, ‘Oh I wish I was a real Indian’, but even within the Native community, there are expectations of what being a Native is, no matter where you are and what tribes you’re around. My mother loved a lot of this kind of kitschy Native stuff that you would see at souvenir shops. But I'm just not interested in performing. I’m happy that now I'm not consciously being Native. It's not a calculation, it's just part of who I am. That wasn’t always true. When I was younger, I was making definite statements.

I saw a performance piece you had done which seemed like a much more direct statement, The Office Shaman.

J: I had just moved from Santa Fe to Seattle. Santa Fe was, and maybe still is, the center of New Age. Every other person I met was a shaman, and if they found out I was Native then of course they’re interested in spiritual practices and all that stuff. At first, it was humorous, and maybe even a little, well, certainly not charming, but I felt more sympathetic. But by the time I left, I was just really sick of it. Paul Amiel (who I am still working on a music project with) and I went to Chaco Canyon at a time that was called the ‘Harmonic Convergence’, which I hadn’t heard of until it came in the mid-eighties, when people around the world were meeting at spiritual centers. We didn’t go to Chaco Canyon because of this, but there was a throng of people there for it. They had set themselves up inside one of the large kivas and set up a plastic totem pole in the center and were sitting around in a circle in lotus position. Stuff like that would just enrage me.

I tell my students sometimes that I'm unsure if we as a culture can even approach the idea of spirituality in a way that is not as a consumer. It’s like the world is our 7-11. So that was a large part of what I was doing as an artist at the time, and The Office Shaman was this idea of a culture that then gets appropriated but more directly desecrated, and how it becomes another capitalist product.

It’s interesting that you describe not believing in art as not “buying in.”

J: Ha! Right. I mean, it’s not like I'm some staunch Marxist; there are problems with that, great things, but also problematic things. I know some of my fellow faculty or activist friends see sitting on the fence as an irresponsible act, but when you’re on the fence, you’re a target from both sides. It’s not a matter of weighing or seeing both sides as valid, but as an artist, it’s your responsibility to question whoever is in power, whether you agree with their worldview or not. That's where I see myself. I still bring up my Native identity, but it's not as a defense against stereotypes. You can easily get caught in that trap and never grow out of it. You’re constantly defending.

Pushing up against the same wall.

J: And the wall just keeps coming, the wall doesn’t shrink, so you keep pounding your head against it. I decided that all of that was more a symptom of something deeper, and that is what interests me more. So I don’t want to get caught up in satirizing the appropriation or stereotyping or any of that, it's too easy. There are other things to talk about. I think a barometer in me is also worried about being a political artist. If I'm a political artist, is it possible that I also depend on the existence of oppression?

To be able to make work?

J: Right. Exactly. It’s not like I'm making work to talk about some issue or situation; it's much more organic than that. I hope it continues not to be calculated. To be honest, I'm at that point in my life that feels like the sweet spot for an artist—where you just make art about what you want to make art about, what you care about. It's not like I have to read some kind of theory to justify it.

There are a lot of things art can be at its worst, but one of those things is narcissistic. I tell my students to think about the things that they care about and use that personal experience as a way to communicate—a bridge, a way for people to connect and hopefully see how they’re implicated. So, it's not narcissism; it's more like sharing, to get a conversation going.

For example, I did a series of paintings called Yellow Dirt which addressed abandoned uranium mines and the ongoing uranium poisoning. I took Google satellite images of where my family land is and other parts of the reservation area and improvised over those. I brought in other collage elements–family photographs from the early and late twentieth century and fragments of Environmental Protection Agency studies. Sometimes they’re completely covered in paint and other times you may see a bit of them.

Could we speak about your use of text and found images in the Assimilations series?

J: A found, ready-made image is a catalyst; it gets rid of the intimidation of a blank canvas. I can respond to it as opposed to trying to invent something out of the ether. I did one experiment with text when I was a young artist after coming across My Friend the Indian in a used bookstore, an absurd pro-Indian, early-twentieth-century book written by a white person. I bought it just for that title, but as I went through it I found these absurd statements, like: “What labor the Indian does he does gladly and openly.” I made a series of paintings with that. I got rid of them because I thought they were painted badly, but I was building up to what I do now.

Text for me is another thing I can respond to. There is one painting called I Can’t Speak My Mother's Language that just kind of came to me when I was sitting in an airport after giving a lecture and I thought, “Oh, I like that as a title for a piece.” I write songs, and text functions in a different way in that arena, but in my visual art, I use it as material for collage. I guess it's a part of that assimilation experience, taking bits of text from Christian or Jehovah’s Witnesses or biblical sources—stuff I grew up with or came across and that evidently pissed me off.

How do you embark on a new idea as someone working across so many different disciplines?

J: God, you know, that's the trick right? I wish I could point to something specific I do. Sometimes I just don’t have any ideas, especially when I'm thinking about all this other stuff. When I was young, I thought way too much. I thought way, way, way too much and so, for the last ten years, I've been trying to stop doing that. I've been trying to stop thinking about why I create. I just use these catalysts and try to fool myself into not thinking while I'm making work. Thought goes into all the formal decisions, but in terms of conceptual decisions, I don’t know where those ideas come from.

It's funny how much thought you put into setting up a space to not think!

J: It's ridiculous!

In the last sentences of your artist statement you say, “For years, I have told my students that artists need to be like fleas on a dog. The goal is not to become the dog, but rather to make sure the dog never becomes too comfortable.” Do you know who or what your dog is?

J: I was thinking of it in political terms. It’s not that we as artists need to become Bolsheviks or something. The dog changes, so, whether the dog is Trump or whether the dog is Biden or someone more politically left, it's a dog. I think this is why artists and intellectuals are so often the ones who are persecuted when certain regimes come to power. It’s the questions, the digging, and making whatever dog is in power uncomfortable. It's also important for artists not to get too comfortable.

There should be a certain level of discomfort across the board!

J: Yeah, we should all be uncomfortable!

MEMORIES OF A SUBURBAN IND'N #1 (TRIPTYCH) 2023.

Acrylic, latex, collage, sand, and graphite on wooden panels, 60 x 180 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.