About ME

Artist Bio

J. R. Welch is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and photographer whose work explores the cultural memory of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. Raised in Hayti, Missouri, in the Bootheel at the northern edge of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, and based in New Orleans for more than two decades, he works across painting, photography, installation, and literature to examine how landscape shapes identity and how art preserves memory.

The river corridor—from the Bootheel through Memphis to New Orleans—forms the foundation of his creative practice. Drawing from the histories, people, and landscapes of the American South, Welch creates paintings, photographs, installations, essays, memoir, and poetry that explore memory, faith, family, migration, resilience, and the quiet stories that often disappear before they enter the historical record. Rivers, birds, churches, abandoned architecture, agricultural landscapes, and Delta mud recur throughout his work as enduring symbols of loss, transformation, and hope.

In the years following Hurricane Katrina, Welch co-founded the Convergence Gallery and Center for the Arts in New Orleans, an artist-run space dedicated to fostering emerging artists and creative collaboration. His writing has appeared in The Christian Century, Reckon Review, Blueline, Pictura Journal, Queen's Review, Tendrils, and other literary journals. His visual art and photography have been featured in exhibitions and publications devoted to contemporary Southern art and visual storytelling. He was longlisted by judge Kristen Arnett for The World's Best Short-Short Story at Southeast Review, is a 2026 Arts Interchange Resident at the Ross Lynn Foundation, and is pursuing an MFA at Louisiana State University, New Orleans.

Welch's current work forms part of the long-term Mississippi River Cultural Corridor, an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to preserving the stories, landscapes, and cultural traditions of one of America's most influential regions through visual art, literature, photography, education, and public engagement.

Artist Statement

I believe places remember.

The Mississippi River remembers.

Its mud carries the residue of migration, labor, worship, violence, celebration, music, family, and survival. Long before I understood history, I learned that landscapes hold memory long after people forget. My work begins there.

I grew up in Hayti, Missouri, where the Mississippi River wasn't a scenic backdrop—it was a fact of life. It flooded, nourished, destroyed, and carried everything that passed through: cotton, commerce, music, faith, and generations of people searching for something better. That corridor, from the Missouri Bootheel through Memphis to New Orleans, became my first education in contradiction, resilience, and belonging.

Working across painting, photography, installation, poetry, memoir, and essays, I create visual and literary archives of the Southern Mississippi River Corridor. Birds, rivers, churches, abandoned homes, weathered architecture, and the human figure become recurring symbols through which I explore memory, trauma, faith, resilience, and transformation. My work is less interested in documenting events than in revealing the emotional and spiritual landscapes that remain after they have passed.

My process is rooted in observation, research, and lived experience. I work from field photographs, sketches, memory, and repeated visits to the same places, believing that landscapes reveal themselves slowly, much like people. In charcoal and paint, I embrace erasure, revision, and visible marks of change. Pentimento is not something I hide; it is the subject itself. Identity, memory, and place are never fixed; they are continually rewritten.

Although deeply personal, my work is not autobiography alone. It asks broader questions about how communities remember, how stories disappear, and how art can preserve what history often overlooks. I am interested in the intersection of cultural memory and contemporary life, where theology meets ecology, where personal narrative meets regional history, and where ordinary lives reveal universal truths.

Ultimately, I see my practice as one part of a larger cultural project. Through exhibitions, books, photography, education, and public scholarship, I hope to contribute to a living archive of the Mississippi River Corridor, one that honors the complexity of its people, celebrates the resilience of its communities, and ensures that the stories embedded within its landscapes continue to shape future generations.

J. R. Welch