About ME

Artist Bio

J. R. Welch is a multidisciplinary artist from Hayti, Missouri, located in the Bootheel, a distinct, flat, agricultural region tied to the Mississippi Delta. He has lived in New Orleans for over two decades. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, he co-founded the Convergence Gallery and Center for the Arts, a space that helped launch the careers of artists who now hold permanent placement in major museum collections.

The river corridor, from the Bootheel south to where the Delta runs out of land, shapes everything he makes. His work spans large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings, acrylic paintings, installations, archival-pigment photography, and literary prose.

Welch grew up with religion nearby but not central to his family or life. In his late teens, it found him. After completing his Bachelor’s Degree, he earned a Master of Theology and spent years writing, making art, and leading nonprofits and religious organizations. After a deeply personal period of religious tension, he turned toward what his soul needed: beauty, curiosity, and the stories of the Delta.

His writing has appeared in Reckon Review, Queen's Review, Blueline, The Christian Century, Pictura Journal, and Tendrils, among others. He was longlisted by judge Kristen Arnett for The World's Best Short-Short Story, Southeast Review. His art has been featured in the George Dunbar Gallery, The Oakland Review, and Gulf Stream Magazine. He is a 2026 Arts Interchange Resident at the Ross Lynn Foundation and an MFA student at Louisiana State University, New Orleans.

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