About ME

Artist Bio

J. R. Welch is a writer, artist, and photographer whose work is rooted in memory, place, and the emotional residue carried by ordinary life. Based in New Orleans, Welch works across charcoal drawing, soft pastel, acrylic painting, archival pigment photography, and literary prose, creating work that is both deeply human and culturally resonant.

Raised in Hayti, Missouri, part of the Bootheel, in the Delta, Welch has spent over two decades rooted in the creative life of New Orleans—writing poetry and essays, making large-scale charcoal  and pastel drawings, and photographing the people and places that define Southern culture.

His current visual work centers on two major series: Witnesses, a collection of large-scale charcoal and pastels including self-portraits and memory currently in preparation for solo exhibition, and The Contested Seat, an exploration of identity, inheritance, and belonging through the visual language of place and figure. Additional bodies of photographic work include The Sound of Rooms, documenting historic recording studios, and The Living Streets, capturing New Orleans parades and processions.

As a writer, Welch has placed work in Reckon Review, Queen's Review, Picture Journal, The Christian Century, Down in the Dirt, and Blueline Magazine. His poem "River Trust" appeared in Blueline, Volume 47. He was longlisted by judge Kristen Arnett for The World's Greatest Short Story, Southeast Review. His poetry manuscript Every Fiber — organized around themes of the body, Delta landscape, and the cost of myths is forthcoming. He is 2026 Arts Interchange Resident, Ross Lynn Foundation.

Artist Statement

My work explores the tension between memory and place, how landscapes hold emotional residue long after the people and events that shaped them have moved on. Working primarily in large-scale charcoal drawings, soft pastels, acrylic on canvas, and archival pigment photography, I examine how personal and collective histories are embedded in domestic interiors, abandoned structures, and Southern environments shaped by migration, industry, and the particular endurance practiced by rural, impoverished, and working-class communities. 

I grew up in Hayti, Missouri, a small Delta town in the Bootheel, where the Mississippi River isn’t scenic—it’s a fact of life. It floods, destroys things and gives life to things, it also carried everything that came through: cotton and commerce and music and people trying to get somewhere better. That corridor between the small towns and the cities along the river system, Memphis always on the horizon for me, New Orleans eventually, gave me my first education in contrast: survival-driven spaces versus aspirational ones, what’s kept in memory and what needs to be healed. That duality lives in my work. Fragile materials rendered with bold mark-making. Quiet rooms that suggest what isn’t being said out loud and portraits that hover between resilience and the cost of struggle.

My process is intuitive yet disciplined. I work from field photographs, sketches, and memory, often returning to the same sites over months or years, because a place reveals itself slowly, the way most people do. In charcoal, I let the erasure show. The smudging, the pentimento, the evidence of revision, and I don’t view that as a flaw I’m hiding. That’s the subject, the story. Identity, like a drawing, is never finished and can continue to evolve. In photography, I work with natural light and lean into imperfection: shadow, grain, the slightly off moment, the life in human expression, and posture that speaks. I’m not interested in photographs that look too clean or posed. The Mid-South I grew up in and know doesn't look clean.

I’ve spent twenty years in New Orleans, a city that understands rupture and return better than almost anywhere. I often ask what Hayti made me, what has evolved, which I’m still figuring out. 

My work keeps asking: What does a place remember? And who gets to tell its story?

J. R. Welch