Trouble with the Index: James Welling

California Museum of Photography

May 20, 2014 - November 30, -0001

James Welling, whose work is included in Trouble with the Index, will speak about his conceptual photographic practice in an informal gallery discussion.

James Welling (b. 1951, Hartford, CT) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013-14); University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2010); Horticultural Society of New York (2007); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio organized a major survey of his work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2009, Welling's work was featured in the critically acclaimed historical survey, The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in 2008, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. In 1992, his work was included in documenta IX. Welling's work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Welling earned his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1974. After teaching briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Bard College, he moved to Los Angeles in 1995 to head the photography area in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continues to teach.

• Trouble with the Index