Harry Lieberman Memory Map - 1973

Completed size: 48 x 168 inches (diptych)

Ink and wood blocks mounted on wood with photographs and photostat text.
Work in progress at John Gibson Gallery, New York.
Private collection.

One of 4 participants, Harry Lieberman, 96, recalled his childhood home village of Ginivashov, Poland as Welch creates a Memory Map from his description.

Review(s) on Harry Lieberman Memory Map, 1973

Welch differs from most Conceptual artists in his sincere interest in people and egalitarian collaboration with them, which is more often characteristic of feminist artists; and he differs from sociologists and documentary photographers in the inventive and often visually striking presentation of his data, arrived at, he says, by “chipping away at the real place and leaving exposed that memory place.”
Lucy Lippard, the Lure of the Local, Published by the New Press, New York, 1997

The typical Narrative work constitutes, through a mixture of visual and verbal means, a resolutely “impure” blending of impulses that might be thought to belong in the fields of literature, sociology, comedy and other disciplines…And thus Roger Welch, in a “performance piece”, brings a 96-year old man into a gallery to reminisce about his childhood in a Polish village. Working together, Welch and the old man try to construct a table top model, with blocks and written indications, of the way his neighborhood looked in about 1885… In effect, these artists have jettisoned, as dead weight, the revolutionary pretensions of modern avant-gardism, replacing them with a spirit of honest diffidence and a love of simple pleasures.
Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times, December 7, 1974

“I see memory as a sculpture created when the totality of an experience is partially forgotten as if carved away. In the Memory Map works, I sought to reveal this sculptural form.”
Roger Welch, 1973