Roger Welch
Encyclopedia
William Roger Welch is an American
conceptual art
ist, installation art
ist and video artist.
in 1946 and graduated from Westfield High School in 1964.
He received a scholarship in 1963 to the Interlochen Center for the Arts
as a percussionist.
The following year he was awarded the John Philip Sousa
Band Award given to the school's most outstanding musician.
After High School, Welch attended York College of Pennsylvania
for one year before transferring to Miami University in Oxford Ohio. At Miami University
, he studied art under
Robert Wolfe Jr. and Crossan Curry. Welch also played drums with the University band and orchestra, as well as professionally with jazz ensembles and a soul band.
During his senior year of college, Welch dedicated himself to an art career. His influences included Frank Stella
, Kenneth Noland
and the shaped canvas paintings of Charles Hinman.
In the summer of 1968 he won a scholarship to the Kent State University Blossom Art Program and studied under Op-Artist Richard Anuszkiewicz
.
In the fall of that year, Welch had his first solo show of minimalist paintings at the Western College Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio.
At the same time, he studied the Earthworks and Non-Sites of Robert Smithson
and was also influenced by a personal meeting with conceptual artist Douglas Huebler
.
In 1969, Welch began graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the sculpture department headed by James Zanzi.
In his first year in Chicago, Welch pursued new forms of art including Conceptual
and Performance
Art. One of his first student works was High Jump in which he invited a national champion high jumper to attempt a world record in the sculpture studio of the Art Institute. He also created Mississippi River Measure by measuring a frozen section of the river with lengths of his outstretched body. Both works were documented in the art publication Interfunktionen. In 1969, Welch visited artist Dennis Oppenheim in his Brooklyn studio. The encounter formed the basis of a life-long friendship.
In 1970, Welch received a scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. That summer, he worked at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York where he organized an exhibition of Earthworks. As a result, Welch met Robert Smithson
and became friendly with Nancy Holt, Jonas Jonas and Richard Serra
.
, Les Levine, Gordon Matta-Clark
, William Wegman
, and Hannah Wilke. Welch also began to work primarily in multi-media and created a three-channel video Passing On. In 1972, Welch had solo exhibitions at Sonnabend
Gallery in Paris, Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Yaki Kornblit-Galerie 20 in Amsterdam.
During his 1973 solo exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery in New York, Welch produced a series of maps drawn from the childhood memories of four elderly people. On consecutive Saturday afternoons over the course of the exhibition, Welch engaged in a dialogue with each person about her or his hometown while he created drawings and a map from their verbal recollections. Visitors could attend the sessions and view previously completed maps and drawings.
This exhibit was followed by a solo show at the Milwaukee Art Museum
which featured the Kitty Ewens Memory Map. The work was created from the childhood recollections of Kitty Ewens, a 101 year old resident of the Milwaukee area. The Memory Maps attracted the attention of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram with whom Welch collaborated in a 1975 exhibition at the Piltzer Gallery in Paris.
Beginning in 1974, Welch devised the video installation The Roger Woodward Niagara Falls
Project also known as The Niagara Falls Project. The work was completed in 1975 and exhibited at the Steffanoty Gallery in New York. Two subsequent video installations, Preliminaries, exhibited in New York at the M.L. D'Arc Gallery in 1976 and the O. J. Simpson
Project at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York extended his explorations in multi-media. In 2008, The O. J. Simpson Project was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
in Madrid.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Welch created two film and sculpture installations, Drive-In, shown at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, in 1980 and Drive-In: Second Feature shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982. John Hanhardt, Whitney Museum Curator of Film and Video, selected Welch's work to inaugurate The New American Film Makers Series. Drive-In: Second Feature has been exhibited in museums and public institutions in the United States, Europe and, in 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. Drive-In is in the collection of the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum
in Mexico City and Drive-In: Second Feature is in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
in New York.
In 1985, Welch was invited to participate in the Construction in Process II exhibition in Munich and created the video The Voice of Clint Eastwood
in Germany. For this project, Welch dialogued with German actors who dub English language films and shot additional video with sound engineers at the Bavaria Film Studio.
While teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, Welch created photo portraits of elementary school children in Austin on the theme of what each wanted to be when they grew up and their visions of the future. The Austin Children series was exhibited at the Liverpool Gallery in Brussels in 1991. In the mid-1990s Welch made a series of photos with frames that structurally mimic the pose or movement of the subject. Of these works, his largest photo installation, The History of Design was completed in 2000 and exhibited at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. The History of Design is a 48 ft. wide Parthenon-like pediment framing life-size photo images of young workers in the process of constructing a wall.
in Meteor Crater, and videos juxtaposing landscapes or combining geologic formations with contemporary man-made structures. For the HD video Laguna Sagaponack, Welch shot Laguna Beach on the Pacific Ocean and Sagaponack, Long Island
on the Atlantic. At each location, Welch mounted a camera in a pre-determined position before dawn then shot selectively throughout the day and into the night. The real-time video is edited from several hours to a few minutes presenting the illusion of natural time. The two places were combined in a soft-split screen to appear as a continuous panoramic landscape. For the exhibition Domicile in 2006, French art critic Pierre Tillet wrote: Welch deals with the visual and emotional closeness of distant spaces.
The video Hudson River
was exhibited at the Kinz Tillou Feigen Gallery, New York in 2008. Two Coasts was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, France in 2006 together with watercolors and studies for future video projects. The Ground Under My Studio, a watercolor, was included in the Watercolor Worlds exhibition at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, New York in 2004. The O. J. Simpson Project will be exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts
in 2012. Backyard, a four channel video and sculpture installation is a work in progress scheduled for completion in 2012.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
ist, installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
ist and video artist.
Biography
Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New JerseyWestfield, New Jersey
Westfield is a town in Union County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the town population was 30,316. The old village area, now the downtown district, was settled in 1720 as part of the Elizabethtown Tract....
in 1946 and graduated from Westfield High School in 1964.
He received a scholarship in 1963 to the Interlochen Center for the Arts
Interlochen Center for the Arts
Interlochen Center for the Arts is a privately owned, 1,200 acre arts education institution in Interlochen, Michigan, roughly 15 miles southwest of Traverse City...
as a percussionist.
The following year he was awarded the John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, known particularly for American military and patriotic marches. Because of his mastery of march composition, he is known as "The March King" or the "American March King" due to his British counterpart Kenneth J....
Band Award given to the school's most outstanding musician.
After High School, Welch attended York College of Pennsylvania
York College of Pennsylvania
York College of Pennsylvania is a private, coeducational, 4-year college located in southcentral Pennsylvania. The school offers more than 50 baccalaureate majors in professional programs, the sciences, and humanities to its 4,600 undergraduate students...
for one year before transferring to Miami University in Oxford Ohio. At Miami University
Miami University
Miami University is a coeducational public research university located in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1809, it is the 10th oldest public university in the United States and the second oldest university in Ohio, founded four years after Ohio University. In its 2012 edition, U.S...
, he studied art under
Robert Wolfe Jr. and Crossan Curry. Welch also played drums with the University band and orchestra, as well as professionally with jazz ensembles and a soul band.
During his senior year of college, Welch dedicated himself to an art career. His influences included Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
and the shaped canvas paintings of Charles Hinman.
In the summer of 1968 he won a scholarship to the Kent State University Blossom Art Program and studied under Op-Artist Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Life and work:Richard Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio , and then with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut where he earned his...
.
In the fall of that year, Welch had his first solo show of minimalist paintings at the Western College Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio.
At the same time, he studied the Earthworks and Non-Sites of Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
and was also influenced by a personal meeting with conceptual artist Douglas Huebler
Douglas Huebler
Douglas Huebler was an American conceptual artist.-Life and career:Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II...
.
In 1969, Welch began graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the sculpture department headed by James Zanzi.
In his first year in Chicago, Welch pursued new forms of art including Conceptual
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and Performance
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
Art. One of his first student works was High Jump in which he invited a national champion high jumper to attempt a world record in the sculpture studio of the Art Institute. He also created Mississippi River Measure by measuring a frozen section of the river with lengths of his outstretched body. Both works were documented in the art publication Interfunktionen. In 1969, Welch visited artist Dennis Oppenheim in his Brooklyn studio. The encounter formed the basis of a life-long friendship.
In 1970, Welch received a scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. That summer, he worked at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York where he organized an exhibition of Earthworks. As a result, Welch met Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
and became friendly with Nancy Holt, Jonas Jonas and Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
.
Work
From 1971 to 1972, Welch created performance works at 112 Greene Street and had his first significant one-person exhibition at 98 Greene Street, an alternative art space run by Holly Solomon. Among his friends and colleagues at this time were Bill BeckleyBill Beckley
Bill Beckley , an American narrative/conceptual artist.-Biography:Born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, a small farming town in the Amish countryside, Bill Beckley attended college at Kutztown University from 1964 to 1968 and in 1970 received a Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University...
, Les Levine, Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.-Life and work:Both of Gordon Matta-Clark's...
, William Wegman
William Wegman
William Wegman may refer to:* Bill Wegman, baseball player* William Wegman , photographer...
, and Hannah Wilke. Welch also began to work primarily in multi-media and created a three-channel video Passing On. In 1972, Welch had solo exhibitions at Sonnabend
Ileana Sonnabend
Ileana Sonnabend was a dealer of 20th century art. She ran a contemporary art gallery in Paris during the early 1960s. After leaving Paris, she opened a Sonnabend Gallery in New York City in 1971, at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo...
Gallery in Paris, Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Yaki Kornblit-Galerie 20 in Amsterdam.
During his 1973 solo exhibition at the John Gibson Gallery in New York, Welch produced a series of maps drawn from the childhood memories of four elderly people. On consecutive Saturday afternoons over the course of the exhibition, Welch engaged in a dialogue with each person about her or his hometown while he created drawings and a map from their verbal recollections. Visitors could attend the sessions and view previously completed maps and drawings.
This exhibit was followed by a solo show at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...
which featured the Kitty Ewens Memory Map. The work was created from the childhood recollections of Kitty Ewens, a 101 year old resident of the Milwaukee area. The Memory Maps attracted the attention of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram with whom Welch collaborated in a 1975 exhibition at the Piltzer Gallery in Paris.
Beginning in 1974, Welch devised the video installation The Roger Woodward Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls
The Niagara Falls, located on the Niagara River draining Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, is the collective name for the Horseshoe Falls and the adjacent American Falls along with the comparatively small Bridal Veil Falls, which combined form the highest flow rate of any waterfalls in the world and has...
Project also known as The Niagara Falls Project. The work was completed in 1975 and exhibited at the Steffanoty Gallery in New York. Two subsequent video installations, Preliminaries, exhibited in New York at the M.L. D'Arc Gallery in 1976 and the O. J. Simpson
O. J. Simpson
Orenthal James "O. J." Simpson , nicknamed "The Juice", is a retired American collegiate and professional football player, football broadcaster, and actor...
Project at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York extended his explorations in multi-media. In 2008, The O. J. Simpson Project was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the official name of Spain's national museum of 20th century art . The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992 and is named for Queen Sofia of Spain...
in Madrid.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Welch created two film and sculpture installations, Drive-In, shown at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, in 1980 and Drive-In: Second Feature shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982. John Hanhardt, Whitney Museum Curator of Film and Video, selected Welch's work to inaugurate The New American Film Makers Series. Drive-In: Second Feature has been exhibited in museums and public institutions in the United States, Europe and, in 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. Drive-In is in the collection of the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum
Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum
Mexico's Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum , located on Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City, was opened in 1981 as a repository for the collection that Rufino Tamayo and his wife Olga acquired during their lifetimes and ultimately gifted to the nation...
in Mexico City and Drive-In: Second Feature is in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
in New York.
In 1985, Welch was invited to participate in the Construction in Process II exhibition in Munich and created the video The Voice of Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
in Germany. For this project, Welch dialogued with German actors who dub English language films and shot additional video with sound engineers at the Bavaria Film Studio.
While teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, Welch created photo portraits of elementary school children in Austin on the theme of what each wanted to be when they grew up and their visions of the future. The Austin Children series was exhibited at the Liverpool Gallery in Brussels in 1991. In the mid-1990s Welch made a series of photos with frames that structurally mimic the pose or movement of the subject. Of these works, his largest photo installation, The History of Design was completed in 2000 and exhibited at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. The History of Design is a 48 ft. wide Parthenon-like pediment framing life-size photo images of young workers in the process of constructing a wall.
Recent Work
Beginning in 2003, Welch produced a series of sculptures, watercolors such as Yankee StadiumYankee Stadium
Yankee Stadium was a stadium located in The Bronx in New York City, New York. It was the home ballpark of the New York Yankees from 1923 to 1973 and from 1976 to 2008. The stadium hosted 6,581 Yankees regular season home games during its 85-year history. It was also the former home of the New York...
in Meteor Crater, and videos juxtaposing landscapes or combining geologic formations with contemporary man-made structures. For the HD video Laguna Sagaponack, Welch shot Laguna Beach on the Pacific Ocean and Sagaponack, Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
on the Atlantic. At each location, Welch mounted a camera in a pre-determined position before dawn then shot selectively throughout the day and into the night. The real-time video is edited from several hours to a few minutes presenting the illusion of natural time. The two places were combined in a soft-split screen to appear as a continuous panoramic landscape. For the exhibition Domicile in 2006, French art critic Pierre Tillet wrote: Welch deals with the visual and emotional closeness of distant spaces.
The video Hudson River
Hudson River
The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...
was exhibited at the Kinz Tillou Feigen Gallery, New York in 2008. Two Coasts was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, France in 2006 together with watercolors and studies for future video projects. The Ground Under My Studio, a watercolor, was included in the Watercolor Worlds exhibition at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, New York in 2004. The O. J. Simpson Project will be exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a fine art museum located in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a campus that covers nearly 8 acres , formerly Morrison Park...
in 2012. Backyard, a four channel video and sculpture installation is a work in progress scheduled for completion in 2012.
Sources
- John Hanhardt, Image World, Exhibition Catalogue, essay by, pg. 106 ill., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1990.
- Andy Grunberg, Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946, (Exhibition Catalogue), Cross River Press Ltd. and Abbeville Press, New York 1987, p. 140; ill p. 159.
- John Yau, "Roger Welch" (Review), Art Forum, Summer 1986, New York, p. 121.
- Wolfgang Längsfeld, Das Automovil in der Kunst 1886–1986, (Exhibition Catalogue) Haus der Kunst, Münich, Germany 1986, p. 206.
- John Hanhardt, "Roger Welch: Drive-In:Second Feature", The New American Filmmakers Series, Number 1, Whitney Museum of American Art 1982.
- Mary Delahoyd, A New Beginning: 1968–78, Exhibition Catalogue, Hudson River Museum, Feb. 3–May 5, 1985, Yonkers, New York, essay by Mary Delahoyd, p. 112, 113.
- San Francisco Video Festival Journal, Roger Welch, Antoní Muntadas, and Andy Kaufman (Exhibition Catalogue), pub. by San Francisco Video Festival 1984, The Video Gallery, San Francisco.
- Hal Himmelstein, Karen Nulf, and Larry Shirley "Personalized Television: Interview with Roger Welch" by Hal Himmelstein, Wide Angle: Film Quarterly, vol. 5, #3, 1983, pp. 70, 74–79.
- Ann-Sargent Wooster, "Roger Welch's Drive In: Second Feature", AfterImage, Dec., 1982, vol. 10, #5, p. 17; pub. by Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, N.Y.
- Shelley Rice "Drive-In", ArtForum, March, 1981, vo. XIX, #7, pp. 88–89.
- Roberta Smith, Four Artists and the Map, (Exhibition Catalogue), Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, pp. 14, 15, 16, 32–35.
- Mary Delahoyd and Jackie Apple, Alternatives in Retrospect, Exhibition Catalogue, pp. 12, 20, 30, 35.
- Peter Frank, Mapped Art, (Exhibition Catalogue), pub. Independent Curators, Inc., New York and the University of Colorado Art Gallery.
- Carrie Rickey, "Roger Welch", Artes Visuales, #27–28 (double issue), March, 1981, Mexico City, pp. 75, 77, 78.
- Jeffrey Deitch, Lives, (Exhibition Catalogue), The Fine Arts Building, New York, published 1975.
- James Collins, "Roger Welch" (Welch film review), Artforum, April 1974, pg. 78- 79, ill. 79.
- George R. Collins, Unbuilt America, Allison Sky and Michelle Stone, Site Inc., Published by McGraw Hill Book Co. 1976, page 9, pg. 250.
- Berta Sichel, First Generation: Art and the Moving Image (1963–1986), page 33, 344-347 ill., Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2007.
- Frank Popper, Art-Action and Participation, New York University Press, New York, 1975, 261- 263 ill.
- Stanley Milgram, The Individual in a Social World, Addison Wesley pub. 1977. page 22.
- Helen Hsu, "Everything is Problemized", Art In America Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China, 2007, pg. 25, 64-65 ill.