Visual artist and writer Donald Fels is active in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He holds a B.A. in Art, History and Literature 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 (1985-6), a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar to India (2004-5), and in 2019-20 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Uzbekistan.
He has twice received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s 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, and a Civita fellow of the Northwest Institute in 2012. Fels has received multiple grants and commissions from the Puget Sound regional arts commissions and from ArtsWA, the state arts commission.
Museums exhibited at include: Chicago Cultural Center, Seattle Art Museum, Center on Contemporary Art, Cultural Development Authority Gallery, Tacoma Art Museum, Bellevue Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, Museum of Northwest Art, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Iron Gallery at the University of Washington Tacoma, Bank of America Gallery, Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, Wing Luke Museum, Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, Penang Museum (Malaysia), DeVos Art Museum, State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Puget Sound, Lewis and Clark College, Cornish College for the Arts, SUNY Plattsburgh, Bellevue College, Seattle Pacific, and University of Washington.
He participated in the 2010 Venice Architectural Biennale, Prospect.2– the American Biennale in New Orleans in 2012, and in 2015, India’s biennale, held in Kochi, Kerala. His work is in collections worldwide.
Fels 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 was the first visual artist in residence at Cornish College for the Arts. In 2013, he was the first non-French artist in residence in the Paris in-situ program, and returned to the program in 2014 and 2015. In 2015, he helped inaugurate the artist residency in Machine Intelligence at Google. In 2016 Fels was artist in residence at Clark House Initiative in Bombay.
From 1995-2015, Fels was a trustee of Seattle’s contemporary art museum, the Henry Art Gallery. He has written about art and culture for The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ARCADE, crosscut, The Seattle Weekly, City Arts, The SF Chronicle, the LA Times, and Le Monde. He was founding President of the Board of Directors of REFLEX, the art magazine.
Fels has undertaken a number of projects following the international trade in commodities, resulting in work in a wide range of media: sculpture, paintings, installations, photography, theater, articles and book manuscripts. He continues to theorize and make art about the relationship between the exchange of materials, ideas and culture around the world.
Trained as a painter, Fels has painted for decades. He has long been fascinated, even mesmerized, by color. Some years ago he began looking into the history of the trade in pigments and dyes– how color has made its way around the world. This research has taken him to Turkey, Syria, Morocco, India, Indonesia, the UK, Italy and Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, Fels followed the trail of Persian Jewish silk dyers who arrived there some 600 years ago.
In 2019 Fels was granted access to the archives of the Savitsky Museum in Nukus, Karakalpakstan. He flew six times to Nukus from Tashkent where he was based, spending a week, 8 hours a day, each trip in the works on paper archive. Igor Savitsky obtained 36,000 works on paper from the families of Soviet avantgarde artists who had created the work in the first decades of the 20th century. It was illegal to produce, retain or collect these non-officially sanctioned artworks. Savitsky brought the artworks from Moscow by train to Nukus in the steppe, where he hid them away. There is now a large museum dedicated to all the work he collected, but less than 50 of the graphic works are on display. Fels was told that most of the work he studied in the archive has never been exhibited anywhere.
In 2022 Fels was awarded a CEC Artist Residency with Ilkhom, the renowned Tashkent theatre troupe. It was hoped that together they could begin development of a theater piece about Igor Savitsky. Most unfortunately, Covid made it impossible for Fels to travel to Uzbekistan.
In 2023 Fels showed collaged books at the venerable Caffe San Marco in Trieste, where many books have been written, including chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The accordion opening books on display had been largely produced by Fels in Tashkent on paper culled from old Russian encyclopedias. After the exhibition closed, Fels continued to work with books in Puglia, but decided to do them as larger folding ‘totems’, to be hung vertically.
In 2024 Edizioni Esperdi in Lecce published un-folding, a beautiful book that treats Fels’s most recent work in Puglia, including the folding books and his sectional pigmented plaster works on poplar. Returning to the US, Fels showed the totems at Peter Miller Books in Seattle. This was followed by an exhibition of new plaster pieces at Museo Gallery on Whidbey Island, his third show there.