About ME
J. R. Welch
J. R. Welch | Rooted + Refined – New Orleans, LA
Long Bio
J. R. Welch is a writer, photographer, artist, and cultural storyteller whose work is rooted in resilience, memory, and the beauty of ordinary life. Based in New Orleans, Welch blends visual and written storytelling with decades of leadership experience to create work that is both deeply human and culturally resonant.
Raised in the American South and formed by both trauma and faith, Welch has spent over twenty-five years in leadership, from caring for spiritual communities, to leading nonprofits, to coaching high-capacity leaders, including business leaders, community builders, and creatives. Alongside that journey, he has always been creating: filling sketchbooks with portraits, taking photographs of music, parades, and city streets, and writing prose, poetry, and essays that wrestle with pain, healing, and hope.
His current bodies of work, from The Sound of Rooms (documenting historic recording studios) to The Living Streets (capturing New Orleans parades and processions) to his haunting charcoal portraits; reflect an untrained but intentional eye for atmosphere, emotion, and presence. Each piece becomes both art and story: objects and faces that seem to watch back, images that invite both memory and imagination.
Welch creates under the name J. R. Welch — an abbreviation to his given name, James Robert, and the initials he has signed for decades. It marks a new chapter of embracing the fullness of his identity as artist, writer, and guide. Whether through gallery exhibitions, books, or leadership coaching, his work invites others to see differently, slow down, and discover meaning in the overlooked corners of life.
Artist Statement
I am a son of the Mississippi River. My life and my work are shaped by three cities that trace its course — Hayti, Memphis, and New Orleans. Together, they form the arc of who I am: survival, discovery, and belonging.
Memphis was the gateway city. It was larger-than-life to me as a child: wrestling on Channel 5, BBQ smoke drifting down Beale, the first zoo, the first theatre, the first taste of culture and spectacle. In Memphis, I discovered imagination, ritual, and the power of music and story to define a people.
Memphis was the gateway city. It was larger-than-life to me as a child: wrestling on Channel 5, BBQ smoke drifting down Beale, the first zoo, the first theatre, the first taste of culture and spectacle. In Memphis, I discovered imagination, ritual, and the power of music and story to define a people.
New Orleans became my home, the city I fell in love with as a young man, honeymooned in, and ultimately returned to. It is here that my writing, photography, and leadership converge. New Orleans gave me not just a canvas but a voice. Its mix of beauty and brokenness, joy and sorrow, art and survival mirrors my own journey.
These three cities are bound together by the Mississippi River and by the road that follows it, I-55, which runs from my hometown all the way to New Orleans. That river, that road, and those cities form the backbone of my creative vision.
In everything I create, whether a photograph, a line of prose, or a charcoal portrait, I am still tracing that river south, listening for its stories, and telling my own.
— J. R. Welch
Beyond the Hero Story
What I’ve learned in leadership is that no single leader carries the full weight of an organization’s rise or fall. Health and harm are woven from many threads—leaders and teams, histories and systems, storms and outside forces. To pretend otherwise puts an unbearable burden on one set of shoulders.
What matters is how we respond together: how we tell the truth about our fractures, how we practice healing in community, and how we nurture spaces where resilience can grow. My coaching, writing, and photography flow from this conviction—that creativity and leadership belong together, not as solo acts but as collaborative, restorative practices.
I believe beauty can emerge even from brokenness, and healing can ripple through teams, cities, and stories when we choose honesty and grace together, allowing hope to take root and resilience to rise, shaping a future marked by compassion and shared strength. We don't need a single hero, we need a collabrate group of healers.
Hopeful City
New Orleans is more than a city to me; it is a living mosaic where brokenness and beauty dwell side by side. Its wounds run deep, yet its cracks shimmer with color, rhythm, and fierce resilience. This is a place that limps and still dances, that sings even through sorrow.
Here, art is not decoration but survival, second lines rising from grief, crab pots boiling joy into the streets, azaleas blooming like stubborn hope. In this city, lament and laughter share the same table, and resilience is less sentiment than sacred discipline.
New Orleans has every reason to be a hopeful city, not because we have arrived, but because people are still at work and play. The story here is unfinished. And in its unfinishedness, we find grace: neighbors planting gardens, churches crossing old lines, artists lifting beauty as resistance. Even here, even now, mercy rises, and beauty keeps breaking through.