Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New Jersey, in 1946. In 1968, Welch was awarded a scholarship to the Blossom/Kent Art Program at Kent State University in Ohio, where he studied under Op artist Richard Anuszkiewicz. He received a BFA in 1969 from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and an MFA in 1971 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1970 to 1971, he completed the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. Spanning video installation, sculpture, photography, works on paper and canvas, conceptual art, and performance, Welch’s practice has been multidimensional since its start in the 1970s. Despite his use of various mediums, themes of identity and personal memory consistently act as springboards for Welch’s approach to his work. Welch is perhaps best known for his series Memory Maps (1973), in which he interviewed elderly participants and simultaneously materialized in wood and ink visual maps of their recollections of their childhood hometowns. Beginning as a performance piece, Welch conducted the interviews in the gallery space, later displaying the works as sculpture. Documenting individual experiences, the maps reconstruct the past as remembered in the present while fixing it for the future through Welch’s interpretation of memory as sculpture. Memory is also the crux of Niagara Falls (1974), a video installation made from the artist’s interview with Roger Woodward, who, 14 years prior, had survived an accidental plunge over Niagara Falls. Centered in a mirrored surface, the video shows a close-up of Woodward’s face, while two screens displaying a four-minute loop of his route down the Niagara River and over the falls physically chart the experience. Shot at an uncomfortably close proximity to Woodward, the film relays an acute sense of danger, visually and emotionally involving the viewer, while Woodward recounts his experience as a personal narrative. Later works include a series of sculptures, watercolors, and videos juxtaposing either similar or fundamentally disparate landscapes. For Laguna Sagaponack (2006), Welch mounted cameras at Laguna Beach on the Pacific Ocean and Sagaponack, Long Island, on the Atlantic, shooting selectively throughout the day. The landscapes are combined in a real-time video with a soft split-screen, appearing as a continuous panorama that addresses the geographical limits of time as well as the visual affinity of distant places. Welch was a recipient of the New York State Council on Arts Creative Arts Public Service Program fellowship (1973, 1976); he was granted a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in the visual arts (1974, 1980). His work has been recognized in numerous solo presentations worldwide, including those at the Milwaukee Art Center (1974); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1977); Museo de arte moderno, Mexico City (1980); and Whitney Museum of American Art (1982). He has participated in group exhibitions at a range of international institutions: Palais des beaux-arts, Brussels (1974); Whitney Museum (1977); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1980); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1981); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1994); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2007). Welch lives and works in New York.