Fjelde was the son of sculptor Jacob Fjelde who came to American from Norway in 1887. He was raised in North Dakota and studied art at the State Normal School there, and at the School of Fine Arts in Minneapolis. He worked for Lorado Taft in Chicago for several years, and then continued his studies at the Art Students League and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. A traveling scholarship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation allowed Fjelde to work in Copenhagen and Paris in 1924-25.
Among his early works are a bust of Abraham Lincoln, modeled for memorials at Oslo, Norway, and Hillsboro, North Dakota, and a relief tablet for the Pioneers' Memorial at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Fjelde was especially expert in the carving of reliefs. Examples are his portrait of Wendell Wilkie that adorns a plaque in the Indiana State Capitol, Indianapolis, and relief panels by him are a feature of the Westinghouse Monument in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A bust of Orville Wright done for the New York University Hall of Fame represents his three-dimensional portrait work.
After serving for a time as chairman of the sculpture department at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, in 1929 Fjelde came to New York, where he taught anatomy and life drawing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. From 1959 to 1963 he was on the faculty of the Academy school. He was an active member of the National Sculpture Society, was its secretary for a time, and the first editor of its publication, National Sculpture Review. He was an active exhibitor at the Academy for more than fifty years, first being represented in an annual in 1920, and served on the Academy Council for the 1959-60 term and again for a full three-year term beginning in 1965. Fjelde moved from New York in 1970, establishing his studio at Orleans on Cape Cod.
