Donald Fels | Resume
BIOGRAPHY
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.
SELECT EXHIBITIONS / PROJECTS
2011 Du Mois Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana
2011 "Red Earth, Golden Gate, Shadow Sky", premier theatrical performances, Seattle, initiated and produced by Fels
2011 "Everything" - Chicago, Illinois
2010 "Water Plant" - Seattle Wastewater Treatment Plant
2010 Gone Missing: The Town of Snoqualmie Falls
2007 Cornish College of the Arts
2006 Crossroads Shopping Center
2005 Vasco da Gama
"For more than fifteen years, conceptual artist Donald Fels has been making art that explores global trade relations. Because he is an artist, rather than a political scientist or sociologist, he approaches these issues in a thoroughly non-linear manner. His current project is a delightful sort of intellectual free-fall surrounding the history of India’s contact with the West."
– Frances de Vuono, Artweek, February 2007
2003 City of Hope
For some reason or other the public health agencies here were not overly excited about the TB threat. Ironically enough, when they did eventually develop an interest, more emphasis was placed on combating TB in cattle than in human beings.
– Samuel Golter, The City of Hope
2002 Courtland Place
“Fels’ residency might be called research and development, in business terms, according to Barbara Goldstein, manager of public art for the Seattle Arts Commission…It’s a calculated risk, based on collaborative experience and commitment. It’s not for every artist, said Fels. He calls it, “starting from zero.”
How do you quantify the payoff for the city’s investment in Fels’s residency at Courtland Place? Even when the hillclimb is complete and the children’s finds are catalogued and displayed along with the neatly typed stories of their elders, it won’t result in a flow of tourist dollars. There will be no water views, celebrity art works, or historic birthplaces to put the city on the travel map.
Maybe the results could be measured in terms of lower crime statistics, numbers of resident trips up and down the hillclimb, or numbers of families with children on Courtland Place. Cities are built with neighborhoods and communities of all descriptions. In that sense, investments in Courtland Place and other neighborhoods in Seattle may bring the biggest payoff of all- a healthy, thriving city with a place for everyone.”
– Clair Enlow, Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, Oct. 23, 2002
2001 Bellevue Art Museum
“Thanks to Don Fels, artist in residence, for asking all the right questions and all the wrong questions, all at the right time.”
– Brian Wallace, Chief Curator, Bellevue Art Museum, “Luminous” 2001
2000 Ex-ILVA Steelworks
1999 East Lake Sammamish Trail
1998 Alki/Duwamish Cuture Trail
The West Seatle Culture Trail gives physical form to those beautiful words spoken so long ago. The relationship of memories as they are attached to place is the primary focus of this project. Collaborating with the three artists, a whole community has engaged in remembering the history of this place. The act of sharing memories has imbued this art work with a pluralist view that will allow generations of viewers to share in the collective memory of the West Seattle community.
– Gail Tremblay, Voices of Community 2001
1997 Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI)
Whenever animals live crowded together, risk of disease increases. Just as feed-lot operators provide steers with antibiotic-laced grain, salmon farmers spike their fish chow with drugs to prevent or treat outbreaks of bacterial diseases. That can promote growth of strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and not just in the pens. Resistant organisms have been found near Japanese fish farms, and the antibiotics themselves have been found months later in sediments underlying the farms. The salmon farms thus could lead to super-tough strains of the diseases already present in North Pacific waters.
– Carla Helfferich, Geophysical Insitute, University of Alaska Fairbanks
1995 Boeing
Symbolically shaped expectations play a central role in the innovation process. New technologies are invariably like newborn babes, coming to fruition only after a long period of nurturing. Within a firm or organization, support for a particular developmental path depends on expectations of future performance, not on existing practical benefits: if such benefits already existed, there would be no need to fund research and development.
– Eric Schatzberg, Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of Aluminum as an Industrial Material.
1993 Sime/Darby and Rubber Research Institute
I offer an ethnography of global connection. The term ‘global’ here is not a claim to explain everything in the world at once. Instead, it introduces a way of thinking about the history of social projects, including ‘business’ and ‘local empowerment’. First such projects grow from spatially far-flung collaborations and interconnections. Second, cultural diversity is not banished from these interconnections; it is what makes them-and all their particularities-possible. Cultural diversity brings a creative friction to global connections.
– Friction, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press, 2005
