Van Deren Coke
(1921 – 2004)
Van Deren Coke was born in 1921 in Lexington, Kentucky where he studied history and art history at the University of Kentucky. He also studied photography in New York at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. In 1958 he received his MA in art history and MFA in sculpture from Indian University, further pursuing a doctorate in art history at Harvard. He advanced his study of photography with Ansel Adams in the 1950s. He taught as a professor at the University of Florida, Arizona State University, and the University of New Mexico. While at UNM he served as founding director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum where he donated more than 1,200 objects from his own collection. Furthermore he served as an intervening deputy director and director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY and was Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1979-1987. His own photographic practice mirrors those 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 work. Van Deren died in New Mexico in 2004. (http://www.azarchivesonline.org)