Jack Welpott

Jack Welpott studied at Indiana University. Judy Dater is recorded as having studied under Jack Welpott. Employment is recorded with Indiana University. Work by Jack Welpott is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

He was born in Kansas City on April 27, 1923, grew up in southern Indiana, and was educated at primary and secondary schools in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. He was drafted into the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 during World War II and served as a radio intercept operator in the South Pacific until 1946. After the war, he returned to Indiana to attend Indiana University Bloomington. In 1949, he earned his BS in Economics from the Indiana University Bloomington. Unsure of his direction, he enrolled in a photography class and met the legendary photography instructor Henry Holmes Smith. Under his tutelage, Welpott became enthralled with black-and-white photography as a fine art form. He studied painting under Leon Golub and Harry Engle, and design with George Rickey, receiving his MS in Visual Communication in 1955, followed by an MFA in 1959.

He began his long teaching career at San Francisco State College as he pursued the career of a professional photographer. In 1973 he was the recipient of the Medal of Arles, France; later that same year he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and, in 1983, a Polaroid grant in association with the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.

Welpott's photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Center of Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Norton Simon Art Museum, Pasadena, California; Oakland Museum of Modern Art, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia. He died of kidney failure on November 24, 2007, at the age of 84.