Visual artist Donald Fels is active in the U.S., Europe and Asia. 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, 4Culture, Artist Trust, the Ferguson Foundation, the Goodfellow Foundation, the Washington Council on the Humanities, the Ella West Freeman Foundation, and the Northwest Institute For Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy. He was a Whiteley Fellow at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Marine Biology Laboratory from 2002-06. Fels has received multiple grants and commissions from the Seattle area arts commissions.
The Washington State Arts Commission recently purchased an entire series of paintings he completed in South India, for permanent installation at University of Washington Tacoma Honors College. 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, NW Museum of Art and Culture, Bologna’s Contemporary Art Museum, Iron Gallery at the University of Washington Tacoma, Bank of America Gallery, Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum, Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, Penang Museum, and at State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Puget Sound, Lewis and Clark College, SUNY Plattsburgh, Bellevue College and University of Washington.
He has inaugurated artist residencies at and for Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, the Steven Holl designed Bellevue Art Museum, the City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital in Los Angeles, and in 2007 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 have explored ideas through work in a wide range of media, in museum exhibitions, installations, and in book manuscripts. He started painting and creating collages as a boy, began showing his art in galleries in the 1970s. He has completed major public pieces on the West Coast- including “Six Pitches” for Safeco Field, home of the Mariners Baseball Club. His “Drawing on the River”, a 36’ steel sculpture, was recently installed in Portland, Oregon. In 2010, he installed “Water Plant”, a kinetic fountain for the City of Seattle.
Since 1995, he has been a trustee of the Henry Art Gallery, the contemporary art museum at the University of Washington. He has written about art and culture for The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, City Arts, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. He writes for Arcade, the NW journal of Architecture and Design, where as guest editor he produced an issue called “The City of Ideas”, and for the on-line journal crosscut.com. In 2011, he had a large exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center and an installation, with his wife, architect Patricia Tusa Fels, as part of Prospect 2, the American Biennial in New Orleans. He also exhibited painted constructions at Du Mois Gallery in New Orleans.
His “What is a Trade?”- a museum exhibition completed with sign-painters in India has been touring since 2008. Fels was artist in residence at the SUNY Plattsburgh campus where the exhibition was featured at their university art museum in 2012. While there he interacted with 15 different classes from four university departments. He has collaborated with a broad group of scientists, many academics, other visual artists, poets, playwrights, architects, engineers, musicians and composers. His work is in collections worldwide.
His most recent public sculpture, the kinetic “Water Plant” was done in collaboration with engineers at Seattle’s Water Treatment Plant. Fels had never worked with water before in his sculptures, but working successfully with the engineers allowed him to develop an entirely passive system that animated the kinetic sculpture, while mimicking the process for treating waste-water at the facility. He prides himself on being a good collaborator, and finds working with others fascinating.
His “Six Pitches”, done for Safeco Field, was a collaboration with the pitching staff of the Mariners. His “Geo-slice” was a collaboration with renowned USGS geologist Brian Atwater. For “Drawing on the River” in Portland, he collaborated with a third generation steel fabrication firm on the site of the sculpture itself. Their experience was heavy industrial fabrication, and they had never before worked with an artist. For the small community of Courtland Place in a neglected area of Seattle, Fels’s research unearthed information that the site had been a refuse dump in the 1920s. He was able to use this information to create Seattle’s first and only urban archaeology dig, completed with a 4th and 5th grade class from a nearby elementary school, with the assistance of 15 Ph.d archaeologists from the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. The Burke, and its curator of public archaeology, Dr. Peter Lape, are now partners with Fels on the project Waterlines, about Seattle’s natural shoreline: www.burkemuseum.org/waterlines.
In 2011 Fels created “Everything”, an exhibition on the reach of Sears for the Chicago Cultural Center. In 2012 he returned to Chicago as artist in residence for a project involving the city’s trees. In 2013 he was In-Situ artist in residence in Paris, where he developed a museum exhibition based on Empress Josephine’s rose garden. His residency was under the auspices of Foundation 93 and the French government. He was the first non-French artist in the decade-long program. With playwright Mark Jenkins, Fels continues collaboration on a play he conceived based on research he completed in Cambodia. Seattle’s ACT Theater will produce the play, “Red Earth, Gold Gate, Shadow Sky”, in its 2014 season.
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.
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. 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.
In 2025, Fels was the first artist in residence with PAMA in Kerala, India at the Pattanam archaeological dig. Pattanam, on the coast near Kochi, is the presumed ancient port of Muziris. The dig has unearthed thousands of artifacts from the Indo-Roman trade of 2000 years ago.
In 2026, Fels will be artist in residence in the archives of the Castromediano Museum in Lecce, Puglia’s oldest museum. The museum’s holdings are rich in archaeological artifacts also from the time of the Indo-Roman trade, particularly in terracotta amphorae that once made that trip. Collaborating with sound artist Rob Millis, Fels will be creating an installation for the museum in Spring 2026.
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.