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, 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. Fels’ work has been exhibited at museums including the Seattle Art Museum, 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, and University of Washington. His work is in numerous collections. Fels has completed artist residencies and special projects with over a dozen school districts around the Puget Sound.
He has inaugurated artist residencies at MOHAI, the Bellevue Art Museum, the City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital in L.A., and in 2007 was the first visual artist in residence at Cornish College for the Arts. Following trade in commodities, Fels has undertaken a number of projects worldwide which have resulted in work in a wide range of media, in installations, and in book manuscripts. He is primarily motivated by ideas and the connections between them. 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, the NW’s premiere contemporary art museum. He has written about art and culture for The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a 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. He is currently completing a major sculpture project for the City of Portland. A traveling exhibition of paintings he completed along with billboard painters in India will be a touring exhibition in 2008-9, organized by the Tacoma Art Museum. This work can be previewed at www.vascoproject.com . He is represented by Davidson Contemporary.
