Born in Johannesburg, where he witnessed the effects of Apartheid, Fein studied industrial psychology before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and later settling in San Francisco. His art ranges over a variety of political issues, from urban blight to the masochistic and homoerotic implications of life in the military to the ongoing "war on terror" and erosion of American civil liberties.
A 2004 exhibit in San Francisco was explicitly intended to make viewers aware of the "nightmarish rollbacks of the Constitution by an Administration that has done more kill civil liberties than Osama bin Laden could ever have wished for in his wettest dreams."
Peter Selz, The Art of Engagement, 2005