For the past thirty years visual artist Donald Fels has been active on the West Coast, in Europe and Asia. He holds a B.A. in Art and American Studies from Wesleyan University, and an M.A. Ed. with Honors from City University where he was the Board of Governor's Presidential Scholar. He also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of Washington. Fels has been a Fulbright Fellow to Italy and a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar to India. He has twice received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a grant recipient of the Jack Straw Foundation, Artist Trust, the Ferguson Foundation, the Goodfellow Foundation, the Ella West Freeman Foundation, and the Washington Council on the Humanities. He was a Whiteley Fellow at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory from 2002-06. Fels has also received multiple grants and commissions from the Puget Sound regional arts commissions.
The Washington State Arts Commission recently purchased an entire series of paintings he completed in South India on the effects of globalization, for permanent installation at University of Washington Tacoma Honors College.
Fels' work has been exhibited at museums including the Seattle Art Museum, NW Museum of Arts and Culture, Center on Contemporary Art, Cultural Development Authority Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Bologna's Contemporary Art Museum, Bank of America Gallery, Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art, Penang Museum, and at UCLA, University of Puget Sound, Hoffman Gallery at Lewis and Clark College, Bellevue College, and University of Washington. His work is in collections worldwide.
Fels has completed artist residencies and special projects with over a dozen school districts around the Puget Sound.
He has inaugurated artist residencies at Seattle's Museum of History and Industry, the Bellevue Art Museum, the City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital in L.A., and in 2007 he was the first visual artist in residence at Seattle's venerable Cornish College for the Arts.
Fels has undertaken a number of projects worldwide that follow the trade in commodities, resulting in work in a wide range of media, installations, and book manuscripts. He continues to theorize and make art about the relationship between the exchange of goods, ideas and culture around the world. As he follows the threads of ideas, he often finds himself in unknown territory, his favorite place to be.
Since 1995, he has been a trustee of the Henry Art Gallery, one of the country's premiere contemporary art museums. He has written about art and culture for The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, crosscut.com, City Arts, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a writer for and guest editor of ARCADE, where he produced an issue called "The City of Ideas" and was founding President of the Board of Directors of REFLEX.
A traveling exhibition of large-scale paintings he completed along with billboard painters in India is touring, organized by the Tacoma Art Museum. This work can be previewed at www.vascoproject.com. He is represented by Davidson Galleries in Seattle.
PBS station KBTC first aired a program about Donald Fels on June 16, 2009. In 2010, the documentary earned the station an Emmy. Click to view.
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