James WELLING
Tuesday | March 17TH, 2pm
Tower Auditorium, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA
Artist James Welling emerged alongside Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Barbara Kruger in the late 1970's. Since that time, Welling has chosen a singularly unconventional path in photography and in photographic pedagogy. After making celebrated sequence of black and white abstract photographs in the early 1980's, Welling documented artifacts of industrial technology--- railroads, textiles, and automobile manufacturing for the next 10 years. In 1995, he took over the prestigious UCLA photography program and installed a color processor and banished analogue black and white printing from the curriculum. Throughout the 2000's Welling worked in color, initially producing analogue color photograms and, beginning in 2006, intense and artificially colored inkjet prints. Choreograph, psychedelic, multilayered digital photographs incorporating dance and architecture made between 2014-19, will be published by Aperture in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition at the Eastman Museum in Rochester in July 2020. Since 2012, Welling has taught analogue photography and a seminar, "Pathological Color," in the Visual Art program at Princeton University. He has also taught in MFA programs at Columbia University and Yale University.
