Access: Artists in Residence Ron Tarver

ALL OF RON TARVER’S WORKS ON DISPLAY AT OFFSITE ARE AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE, $1,600 EACH.
Ron has generously discounted his work 20%, exclusively for Fitler Club and Offsite Members.

PHOTOGRAPHER RON TARVER’S Conversation series uses photographs his father, Richard Tarver, produced in the 1940s and 50s to construct contemporary images that comment on the legacy of racial strife in the United States. The more than 300 photographs and over 1000 black and white negatives Richard Tarver produced of the African American residents in the small Oklahoma town of Fort Gibson are from a time when Jim Crow laws were still in place. Tarver’s perspective is that while those laws have since been abolished, their legacy lives on.

REFLECTION ON THE PRESENT “[Above] are a couple of images I’ve made during quarantine from photographs taken while on long walks with my wife and our dog, Winston. I saw the first one during a walk through the woods near our house. It is of a blue ball resting between two poplar trees. To me, the image seems unsettling and hopeful at the same time which are, I suppose, feelings most of us are having during these days. The other is the untethered exuberance of Winston as he chased a golf ball through a drainage pipe at an abandoned golf course that is being turned into a residential community.” – Ron Tarver

RON TARVER received a BA in Journalism and Graphic Arts from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art specializing in photography at Swarthmore College. Before Swarthmore, Tarver was a photojournalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years where he shares a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system.

A recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, he has also received grants and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and an Independence Foundation Fellowship.  His work is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art in Washington DC, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. Most recently he was awarded a solo exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia during their 94th Annual International Photography and Print Completion.