D. Lee DuSell

Not only is D. Lee (“Lee”) DuSell “an artist of all trades,” he is truly a master of most of them. At 87 years of age, Lee has been producing spectacular artwork in multiple mediums for more than six decades, moving comfortably among such focuses as painter and printmaker to fashion illustrator to art instructor to businessman, to woodworker and metal smith, to college professor, and back-and-forth. Lee DuSell’s remarkable designs and artwork can be found throughout the United States as well as in Japan and Saudi Arabia. On his letterhead is listed the word “Artist,” but he is so much more than that. Like many creative people in the later years, he readily admits that he remains “always more interested in what I haven’t done than in what I have done.”

Lee was born in Aurora, Illinois, on June 26, 1927. Today he lives on a farm near Syracuse, New York. A 1944 graduate of East Aurora High School, he attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, first in 1944, and then again from 1946 to 1947, after his military service. With “kinfolk in Aurora (he still has relatives in the area) and art school in Chicago,” Lee has never ignored or forgotten his Midwest roots.

Delbert Peterson and his wife, Jeanne, nominated Lee for the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame. A 2012 inductee himself, Delbert was a former classmate of Lee’s and fellow artist from high school. Lee also was best man at Delbert and Jeanne Peterson’s wedding.

Lee served in the U.S. Navy, where he was more engaged in painting portraits of officers than participating in combat. Upon discharge, a former teacher encouraged him to go paint in Mexico, which he did, for six months. During his stay in Mexico, Lee was able to visit and meet muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. Working on a large wall with his thick glasses and rumpled work clothes, the muralist, who had only one arm, was inspirational as an artist spreading his ideas out where everyone could observe and study them. Lee remembered that during the visit Orozco was asked to identify a superior art school. His answer was, “What is an art school?” Lee realized then that, to a large extent, artists are essentially self-taught. “As a teacher, I was convinced that my first priority was to assist the student in discovering their individual art and helping them to develop that important commodity. Art is much more than 2 + 2 = 4.”

After Lee returned to the states from studying in Mexico at the Escuella De Bellas Artes, his paintings were exhibited at the Aurora YMCA. His high school biology teacher, Roy Davis, happened to view them, and was so impressed that he asked Lee to do the illustrations for the biology book he was writing.

Another friend recommended, after Mexico, that Lee consider the Cranbrook Academy for college and, at the age of 22, he was accepted there on the basis of his portfolio only. Lee met his future wife, Mary, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where they had painting studios across from each other.

When they married, Mary was working in metal, specifically jewelry, and Lee said he became “enamored” by how she crafted the pieces. According to one of Mary’s accounts, Lee’s “early art experiences began to shape a philosophy” at a time when Saarinen, Eames, Bertoia, and Milles were close to the Cranbrook community – they were all showing the “interaction of art and everyday life on very lofty levels.”  

The DuSells left Cranbrook at the end of the school year in 1950 and were married in the fall after Lee was offered a job as director of the Art Barn School of Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. The new position lasted about a year. Again, Mary explained their reason for returning to Aurora: “Life had a way of moving us out of those comfortable situations and throwing us off in a new direction.” Because of a medical emergency, Lee began running the business side of his father’s garment factory during the day, and building furniture in the basement of the DuSell family home in the evenings. His father had worked for Kaufmann Brothers on the east side, but opted to start his own clothing company, Aurora Garment Company, as a subcontractor manufacturing dresses for R & M Kaufmann, his former employer. Lee worked for his father for five years. Newly married, Lee and Mary needed furniture, so he set about designing and building it himself in the evenings after coming home from work.

When a young friend in architecture recommended that Lee enter the first Designer Craftsman USA competition at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts in New York in 1953, he submitted a table he built in the basement of his family home in Aurora. This extraordinary birch-top dining table with high, arching cast-aluminum legs was subsequently featured in the October 2, 1956, edition of Look magazine in a two-page spread showing the elegant table, along with another smaller DuSell table and other furniture pieces under the title “The Platinum Look – Practical aluminum and stainless steel give home furnishings a cool, billion-dollar look.”

Decades later the Boston Museum of Fine Arts hosted an exhibit called “The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940 – 1990.”  The curator for the exhibit phoned Lee and requested a negative of the original photograph of the table for use in the book to be published with the exhibit. Ultimately, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston purchased the restored original prototype table, making it part of their permanent collection in 2005.

“Having the opportunity to acquaint Minoru Yamasaki, architect, with my work, I drove to Detroit with a station wagon full of my things to show him. He seemed impressed and invited me to visit his McGregor Conference Center, which was under construction on the campus of Wayne State University, while I was in Detroit. I was very impressed by what I saw. Eight exterior doors were required. Upon returning to my studio I built a jewelry quality model of my proposal and shipped it to him. When he received it, he immediately telephoned to express his pleasure and approval of the design. This was my first serious collaboration with an architect. It was not always that simple – beginner’s luck. Thereafter, the McGregor door model was permanently displayed in his personal office for thirty years.”

While associated with architect Minoru Yamasaki as a consultant, Lee designed the Bimah area for the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois (1961-1964), created the lighting fixture for the arches of the Federal Science Pavilion for the Seattle World’s Fair (1962), designed the elevator doors, desks, and hardware accoutrements for the World Trade Center Twin Towers (1965-1968), created the bronze entryway and window grilles for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (1976-1978), and created the altar wall, god house doors, and furniture for the Shiga Sacred Garden in Shigaraki, Japan (1980-1983), among many other notable projects.

One of his most difficult projects upon which he collaborated with Yamasaki was the Saudi Arabian monetary building. Many symbols and forms were prohibited. Lee learned that the two-story high decorative window grilles were a ground level security factor and no openings were permitted that were large enough to insert a monkey that was trained to open locks with keys.

Without question, D. Lee DuSell has excelled in multiple artistic fields. Installations of his unique artwork can be seen throughout the world in office buildings, campuses, government buildings, and sacred places. Nine of the United States and its capital (Michigan, Illinois, California, New York, Washington, Minnesota, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC), plus Japan and Saudi Arabia are settings for his architectural elements and enhancements, furniture, sculpture, and drawings.

As the first chairman of the Experimental Studios at the Syracuse University School of Art in New York (1965-1992), Professor DuSell has given us 30 years as an artist consultant and 30 years instructing other budding artists, designers, and craftsmen. As son Brian described it, “My father engaged in both the commissions and professorship for over 30 years. Apart from these endeavors, my father has created a significant body of artwork purely for his own artistic exploration. Most of this is inspired by his Christian faith and is often expressed in the form of angels.”

Mildred Fagen offered these words when Lee DuSell was honored by the Guild for Religious Architecture on May 15, 1967:  

Though endowed with rich and many-sided talents as designer, craftsman, artist and sculptor, D. Lee DuSell is a man of uncommon modesty. He executes his commissions within a wide span of disciplines – from the lyric to the epic, from the dynamic to the mystic, but always with a deep sensitivity and devotion to the specific problem. In making him an honorary member we enrich ourselves as his work consistently has integrity of material, beauty of concept and exaltation of purpose.”

In addition to this honorary membership, in 1979, Lee DuSell was named an Honorary Member of the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art & Architecture, American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.).  In 1987, he received the Honor Award for Art in Architecture from the Detroit Chapter of the A.I.A.

Lee is an artist who entered art school solely on his portfolio, who commenced teaching industrial design at Syracuse University without academic credentials, and who was elected to be Chairman of Experimental Studios Department, with a faculty of six, for the Syracuse University School of Art. When asked about his architectural design work, Lee responded, “I attempt to produce work at human scale which enhances the spirit of the architecture.”

The following excerpt from the textbook, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft © The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, Inc., described Lee’s philosophy well:

D. Lee DuSell, who taught design at Syracuse University, made some very interesting furniture in the mid 1950s. He had studied painting and printmaking at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the late ‘40s and was influenced by the idea that design could be a comprehensive gathering of art, craft, and architecture. He did not identify himself as a woodworker, feeling closer to the tradition of progressive 1930s designers like Walter von Nesson and Donald Deskey, who used metal freely. Working in the basement of his family home in 1953, he made a gorgeous aluminum and birch table that took advantage of the inherent strength of cast aluminum for legs and understructure far thinner than possible with wood. The birch tabletop, hardly worked at all, seem to float above the structure, defying gravity… DuSell went on to become an architectural consultant, generating metal architectural elements such as doors, screens and liturgical fittings for more than 30 years…”

During Lee’s 30-year association as a consultant to architect Minoru Yamasaki, his other projects included the design of the Bimah area for the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois (1961-64); creating the lighting fixture used in the arches of the Federal Science Pavilion for the Seattle World’s Fair (1962); designing the main lobby, reception desk, the elevator doors, ceiling, and other hardware accoutrements for the  Michigan Consolidated Gas building in Detroit, Michigan (1960-63); designing the typical office door hardware and elevator call buttons for the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York (1965-68); creating the 100-foot high bronze entry wall and two-story high bronze window grilles for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (1976-78); and designing the bronze altar wall, special doors covered in gold leaf, altar table, and seating for the Shiga Sacred Garden temple, Shigaraki, Japan (1980-83). A final project in Japan was a Shrine Altar for a remarkable building designed by the Japanese architect, Tadayoshi Ito.

Lee and Mary had three sons: The first son, Noll, is a CNC machinist and resides in North Syracuse, New York. The second son, Gordon, is an architect and resides in Phoenix, Arizona. The third son, Brian, is a concert organist and music director at the St. Ignatius Church in Chicago, Illinois.

In 1970, the DuSells moved to a farm in central New York where Lee established a studio and Mary opened an antique shop. “I’m a country person, raised in Illinois,” he explained, “My relatives were farmers.”

Now retired from the university, Lee continues to work in his studio on the farm. Sadly, however, he works alone as his beloved Mary passed away in 2012. For more than 62 years they enjoyed a long and happy marriage. According to their son, Dr. Brian DuSell, Mary was also an artist and “it was she who introduced my father to an artistic world beyond painting. Once introduced to this new world of craft jewelry, designer furniture, and sculpture, my father fully found his expression as an artist.”

As Mildred Fagen stated when Lee was awarded an Honorary Membership in the Guild for Religious Architecture, he is an artist who, for more than six decades, has dedicated himself to “integrity of material, beauty of concept, and exaltation of purpose,” characteristics evidenced by his work, whether for a World’s Fair, a Jewish temple, a Japanese shrine, Henry Ford’s office, or a simple dining table.

Today, if he were to answer the question, “How will you make a living as an artist?” his response would likely be the following: “In my 87th year, I will tell you. Our lifestyle, along with the variety of projects that I was privileged to be a part of, exceeded our expectations and are gifts to be treasured. Therefore, I lift my voice with praise and thanksgiving to the living God, my God, for the guidance, help, and opportunities which became our life path and careers.” Lee considered himself one of those fortunate individuals who lived his life doing exactly what he enjoys doing most.

His artwork and designs have been featured in numerous galleries and public and private organizations since 1948.  Among the work of which he is most proud are:  an altar design for architect Tadayoshi Ito in Japan; designs for Henry Ford’s office in Michigan; crosses for the Lynnwood Reformed Church of Guilderland, New York; and the creation of bronze sculptures for the “Top Industry Practices Award” of the Nuclear Power Industries.

Locations where the creations of D. Lee DuSell may be viewed include: the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; the North Shore Congregation Israel, Glencoe, Illinois; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (bronze sculpture entitled “Spiritual Freedom” located on the exterior plaza); the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan (etching entitled “Rooster”); the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the Shiga Sacred Garden, Shigaraki, Japan; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (the original DuSell dining table).

Dr. Brian DuSell shared the following with the audience in attendance at the May 1, 2014, induction banquet celebration:

Good evening, I am Brian DuSell, Lee DuSell’s son. My father, owing to his advanced age, no longer travels far from his home and studio in rural upstate New York. He is deeply honored to be included in the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame and has asked me to convey the following statement to you on this occasion.

To the Board of Directors of the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame, Fellow Inductees, and Guests, Imagine the deluge of thought that has flooded my memory upon receiving your award. In a single moment of time, I have recalled childhood, teen years, service in the United States Navy, art school, marriage, family, career, and now old age. There are many individuals who deserve my deepest gratitude for this rewarding journey. At this particular moment, one person stands out and that is (2012 FVA Hall of Fame Inductee) Delbert Peterson, my Aurora East High School art buddy. It was he and his wife Jean who thought of nominating me for this prestigious award. My heartfelt appreciation goes to them for making this honor a reality. In years past, occasionally I have received recognition for a specific project. Those infrequent moments now pale in comparison to being recognized in your Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame. I hope that you will allow me to interpret this honor as a tribute to my total career and life.

I would be remiss if I did not share with you my lifelong conviction. Namely: my life has been a blessing from the living God. God has given me everything including my interest and talent in art. For this, I have always sought to praise and thank him for all of his guidance and inspiration in my work.

I consider myself one of those fortunate individuals who has lived his life doing exactly what I enjoy doing. In fact, it seldom felt like work because I was enjoying myself so much.

Finally, I want to express my respect for the individuals living in my hometown of Aurora, IL, who have conceived and implemented the “Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame”. It suggests to me that there is a level of enlightenment and sophistication in Aurora and the Fox Valley that sets it apart from the norm. You are to be congratulated and appreciated for your accomplishment.

I am significantly honored to be a member of the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame. It is unfortunate that my many years make it impossible for me to personally share this treasured moment with you. Thank you for your generous tribute to my career as an artist.

In Gratitude,
D. Lee DuSell

May 1, 2014
Torpy Pond, Erieville, NY