The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge Island, Washington. Photo: Paul R. Burley / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
RYAN! Feddersen, a Tacoma-based artist and enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, has won the 2026 BRAVA Award in the Native American and First Nations Artist category, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art announced.
The museum’s BRAVA awards — short for BIMA Recognizes Achievement in the Visual Arts — honor four contemporary artists each year. The Native American and First Nations category is open to artists who live and work in the Salish Sea region, on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
Coyote, the internet and the boarding schools
Feddersen, who is from the Okanogan and Arrow Lakes bands and grew up in Wenatchee, Washington, earned a bachelor of fine arts from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009. She is known for site-specific installations and public artworks that invite audiences to participate.
Her recent series draws on Plateau lore, particularly the trickster Coyote, to address contemporary problems. In “Coyote and the Wormhole” (2025), Coyote discovers that people have been trapped in the digital realm and steers the monster that holds them “off the internet,” according to the museum’s description. “Coyote Tries Again,” an installation of 81 prints, emphasizes persistence: Each time Coyote perishes, he is revived in the river so he can try again.
Her 2020 work “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” shown at the Wellin Museum in New York, takes its title from the slogan associated with the federal Indian boarding school system. It depicts what the museum calls two systems of state-sponsored cultural genocide, Indian removal policy and Indian boarding schools. Visitors were invited to touch the work, whose black bars were coated in ink that turned translucent with body heat, revealing the names and locations of boarding schools beneath.
Feddersen’s public work includes “Inhabitance,” a series at Portland International Airport representing the region’s biomes, and “Antecedents,” a set of light boxes at the University of Washington’s Population Health building.
In her words
“My practice playfully applies creative strategies to activate engagement and provide opportunities for exploration, introspection, and epiphany,” Feddersen writes in her artist’s statement. “Each artwork invites people to consider our relationships to history, culture, the land, and non-human-kin. We can decide to live in better relationship to the land and each other.”
Her work fits within a broader movement of Native artists who treat cultural expression as an act of sovereignty: telling their nations’ stories in their own terms, through their own traditions, in public spaces that were long closed to them.
Source: Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
