William Roger Welch (February 10, 1946) is an American conceptual artist, installation artist and video artist. Biography Roger Welch was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1946 and graduated from Westfield High School in 1964. He received a scholarship in 1963 to the Interlochen Center for the Arts as a percussionist. The following year he was awarded the John Philip Sousa Band Award given to the school's most outstanding musician. After High School, Welch attended York College of Pennsylvania for one year before transferring to Miami University in Oxford Ohio. At Miami University, he studied art under Robert Wolfe Jr. and Crossan Curry. Welch also played drums with the University band and orchestra, as well as professionally with jazz ensembles and a soul band. During his senior year of college, Welch dedicated himself to an art career. His influences included Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland and the shaped canvas paintings of Charles Hinman. In the summer of 1968 he won a scholarship to the Kent State University Blossom Art Program and studied under Op-Artist Richard Anuszkiewicz. In the fall of that year, Welch had his first solo show of minimalist paintings at the Western College Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio. At the same time, he studied the Earthworks and Non-Sites of Robert Smithson and was also influenced by a personal meeting with conceptual artist Douglas Huebler. In 1969, Welch began graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the sculpture department headed by James Zanzi. In his first year in Chicago, Welch pursued new forms of art including Conceptual and Performance Art. One of his first student works was High Jump in which he invited a national champion high jumper to attempt a world record in the sculpture studio of the Art Institute. He also created Mississippi River Measure by measuring a frozen section of the river with lengths of his outstretched body. Both works were documented in the art publication Interfunktionen. In 1969, Welch visited artist Dennis Oppenheim in his Brooklyn studio. The encounter formed the basis of a lifelong friendship. In 1970, Welch received a scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. That summer, he worked at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York where he organized an exhibition of Earthworks. As a result, Welch met Robert Smithson and became friendly with Nancy Holt, Jonas Jonas and Richard Serra. Work