William Roger Welch is an American conceptual artist, installation artist and video artist.
17 Facts About Roger Welch
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Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1946 and graduated from Westfield High School in 1964.
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Roger Welch received a scholarship in 1963 to the Interlochen Center for the Arts as a percussionist.
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Roger Welch played drums with the University band and orchestra, as well as professionally with jazz ensembles and a soul band.
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Roger Welch's influences included Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and the shaped canvas paintings of Charles Hinman.
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In 1969, Roger Welch began graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the sculpture department headed by James Zanzi.
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Roger Welch created Mississippi River Measure by measuring a frozen section of the river with lengths of his outstretched body.
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In 1969, Roger Welch visited artist Dennis Oppenheim in his Brooklyn studio.
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In 1970, Roger Welch received a scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.
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From 1971 to 1972, Roger 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.
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Roger Welch began to work primarily in multi-media and created a three-channel video Passing On.
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In 1972, Roger Welch had solo exhibitions at Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, Konrad Fischer in Dusseldorf and Yaki Kornblit-Galerie 20 in Amsterdam.
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On consecutive Saturday afternoons over the course of the exhibition, Roger Welch engaged in a dialogue with each person about her or his hometown while he created drawings and a map from their verbal recollections.
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The Memory Maps attracted the attention of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram with whom Roger Welch collaborated in a 1975 exhibition at the Piltzer Gallery in Paris.
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At the beginning of the 1980s, Roger 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.
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In 1985, Roger 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.
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At each location, Roger Welch mounted a camera in a pre-determined position before dawn then shot selectively throughout the day and into the night.