Background on Thomas Fels
Thomas Weston Fels is a curator, writer, art historian, and more recently an artist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1946, Fels spent his teenage years at The Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Southern Vermont. Upon completion, Fels enrolled in Amherst College, and after graduating in 1967, moved to the Montague Farm commune. Fels lived on the farm from 1969 to 1973, and was an integral member of the larger communard community, extending from Packer Corners, Johnson Pasture and Tree Frog Farm, in Guilford Vermont, to the nearby Wendell Farm in Massachusetts. While at Montague, Fels associated with prolific writers, artists and photographers of 1960s counterculture, such as Harvey Wasserman, Ray Mungo, Peter Simon, and many others.
After leaving the commune, Fels returned to school, attending the graduate program at Williams College. He graduated in 1983, earning a Masters degree in the History of Art. In the years following graduation Fels was awarded several prestigious fellowships. In 1986, he became a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1998 was awarded a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library, in California. His career has seen him employed by numerous museums across North America, ranging from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, to the new Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum in Vermont, which he directed from 2000 to 2005. Fels has organized many exhibitions throughout his career, some internationally. In California, Fels’ exhibition "Carleton Watkins: Western Landscape and the Classical Vision" was presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, while his exhibition "Fire and Ice: Treasures from the Photograph Collection of Frederic Church at Olana", was shown at both the Dahesh Museum in New York, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
In addition to his curatorial duties, Fels’ work as a researcher and writer has led him to publish a variety of catalogs and companion pieces to his exhibitions as well as numerous articles and books. In 1989, he published O Say Can You See: American Photographs 1839-1939 (MIT Press) to accompany the exhibition of the same name. In 1994, he edited a single issue of Farm Notes, a successor to the Montague commune’s Green Mountain Post (formerly New Babylon Times). In 2008, Fels published the memoir Farm Friends, reflecting on his time on the Montague commune and after, the counterculture era, and the trajectories of several of his colleagues from that time. Beginning in 2005, Fels helped found the Famous Long Ago Archive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, collecting the personal papers of members of the communard community. These now more than twenty collections contain articles, manuscripts, photos, posters, oral histories, and other material of historical interest. He continued to reflect on Montague Farm, publishing Buying the Farm (UMass Press) in 2012, providing an in-depth history of the commune, chronicling the farm from its beginning in 1968 through the following remarkable thirty-five years of its existence. In a national review of Buying the Farm, scholar of intentional communities Timothy Miller wrote that with the publication of this latest report from its writers and critics, Montague was probably the best documented of all the several thousand communes of its era.
Since 2013, Fels has been showing his unique large cyanotypes throughout the American Northeast. Since 2015 they have been displayed and sold in Europe and the United Kingdom as well. Since 2016, his life-sized renderings of foliage have appeared in sales at Christie's auction houses in Paris, London, and New York. Along with his photography and historical work, Fels can often be found working at home in his studio or at his desk in Southern Vermont.
The Thomas W. Fels Montague Farm Collection is a part of the Famous Long Ago Archive, alongside the papers of Ray Mungo, Steve Diamond, Jon Maslow, Carl Oglesby and others. Fels has long maintained a goal of supporting the collections of the Famous Long Ago Archive, envisioning their use to encourage recognition of the a strong connection between the counterculture and the broader American cultural scene.
