Cameron Welch USA, b. 1990

Cameron Welch is a mosaic artist who employs the materials and processes of his medium to develop narratives relating to his biography. The works tend to be large-scale, and often consist of thousands of hand-cut, inlaid pieces of glass and stone.

Welch is interested in the ways mosaic and collage are material manifestations of intertextuality. The physical aspects of the work evoke ancient art history, while the subject matter introduces figures and stories that are completely absent from these types of works when viewed in institutional settings like museums or art history books. Welch refers to the colliding contexts he opens up in the work as a kind of “infiltration.” 

“I’m biracial and that’s always been a very big springboard for a lot of my practice, always living with that liminal space,” Welch says. “I identify with collage in that same way, colliding one context with another to see what happens with that space.”

In addition to issues such as his racial background and the experience of being raised by a single mother in the American Midwest, Welch’s compositions are embedded with references to contemporary culture, myth, and art history. The content within the work is heavily abstracted, and yet it is important to Welch that he infuse the compositions with a sense of drama and emotion.

Welch earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. His work has recently been exhibited at Frieze New York, NADA New York, NADA Miami, UNTITLED Miami, The Armory Show, and Art Brussels. He recently produced a unique print in collaboration with Art in America Magazine for their New Talent Issue, guest edited by Antwaun Sargent. Welch was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016, and was the recipient of One River School’s Emerging Art Award in 2019.