Roger Welch
Roger Welch | |
---|---|
Born | Westfield, New Jersey, U.S. | February 10, 1946
Nationality | American |
Education | Miami (Ohio) University, Art Institute of Chicago |
Known for | Conceptual art, installation art, video art |
Movement | Conceptual art |
William Roger Welch (February 10, 1946) is an American
Biography
Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New Jersey 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
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
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
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.
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 Beckley, 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
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
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
Recent Work
Beginning in 2003, Welch produced a series of sculptures, watercolors such as
The video
References
- Interfunktionen #8, published by Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, Cologne, Germany, January 1972, pages 84–89
- Barbara Radice, "Story Art", Data Arte, July–August 1975, Milano, Italy, pp. 84, 107-109 ill.
- Joseph Jacobs, "When Video Was Young", Art in America, May 2007, pg. 119-121, ill. 121
- Pierre Tillet, Domicile Prive/Public, Musee d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Metropole, France, pg. 216-219, 2005
- Gerrit Henry, "Roger Welch", Art in America, December 2001, review of Neuberger Museum of Art exhibition, page 128 ill.
- Robert C. Morgan, "Intimate Art", Tema Celeste, May 2000, pg. 40-41ill.
- Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local, published by the New Press, New York, 1997, pg. 80-81 ill.
- Michael Archer, Installation Art, Edited by Nicolas de Oliveira, Michael Petry, Nicola Oxley, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1994 p. 110, ill.
- William Zimmer, "A Genre Comes Into Its Own", The New York Times, Sunday, August 2, 1992 (NJ), pg. 11.
- Jeffrey Deitch, "Subconscious Sculpture", Roger Welch: Sculpture of Memory, (exhibit catalogue), Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City 1980, p. 9-12
- I. Michael Danoff, The Art of Roger Welch, Roger Welch (exhibit catalogue), Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1974, p.p. 2-7
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.