James Welling (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) is a postmodern artist. He earned both a BFA and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he studied with, among others, Dan Graham. He emerged in the 1970s as a postconceptual artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were and remain contested and problematized. James Welling has consistently pushed the limits of documentary and abstract photography, reinventing the medium in the process. Experimenting with materials such as draperies, pastry dough, and window screens, Welling’s abstract works play with dimension and color to engage the physiological capabilities of the human eye.