San Miguel de Allende,Mexico
Van Deren Coke
Created : 1992
Donated : 2006
Medium : Photography
Dimensions: 11 inx10 in
Located: 2nd Floor,Northwest Hallway
Van Deren Coke was a photographer, scholar, curator, and art historian. He began his photographic career in the late 1930s at the University of Kentucky. During the 1950s, he studied with Ansel Adams. He moved to New Mexico in 1962, where he became the founding member of the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico, as well as the chairman of the university’s Department of Art and Art History. He would later become the director of the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House in New York.
In 1979, he became the curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Art until his retirement in 1987. His own photographic technique mirrors that of the Surrealists, in which he used 19th-century negatives along with his own manipulated prints to create an element of graphic design in his photographs—exploring experimental techniques like solarization and montage, and blurring the literalism of an image while retaining its link to reality.
He authored several books on painting and art in New Mexico, and his scholarship as an art historian earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989. His photographs are exhibited and collected internationally.
