Ron Tarver is an internationally recognized, lens- based artist and educator based in Philadelphia, PA. He grew up in rural, northeastern Oklahoma where he spent many long, hot summer days hauling hay and working on local farms. His grandfather was a working Black cowboy in the 1940s.

 

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 is an Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College. Before joining the faculty at Swarthmore, he was a staff photojournalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years. His work there won him a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system. While at The Inquirer, he was nominated for three additional Pulitzers and among other honors, received awards from World Press Photos and the Sigma Delta Chi Award of the Society of Professional Journalists.

 

Tarver has received Guggenheim Foundation, Independence Foundation, and Pew Foundation Fellowships, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in many museum, corporate and private collections, including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

He is the co-author of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, published by Harper Collins (2005). The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America book is forthcoming in summer 2024.