Ron Tarver

Ron Tarver (b. 1957) comes by his interest in contemporary Black cowboys through his own experience. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy during the 1940s who drove cattle along the Verdigris River, from Fort Gibson to Catoosa, Oklahoma, and was reported to have one of the best roping horses in the area. Tarver grew up in northeastern Oklahoma, in the small agricultural community of Fort Gibson, where he spent many long, hot summer days hauling hay and working on local farms. He received a B.A. in journalism and graphic arts from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and an M.F.A. from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Currently an Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, he previously was a staff photojournalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer for thirty-two years. Nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes, he was part of the team that won the 2012 Award for Public Service Journalism for a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system, and he also has received other awards from World Press Photos and the Society of Professional Journalists Tarver’s fine-art photographs have appeared in more than thirty solo and eighty group exhibitions, and they are in numerous collections, including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Oklahoma History Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Studio Museum in Harlem. He has been awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts/Photography, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Independence Foundation. He is co-author, with journalist Yvonne Latty, of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans (Harper Collins, 2004), which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition that debuted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.