Van Deren Coke collection

Van Deren Coke (1921-2004) was a photographer, curator, and art historian. He was born in July 1921 in Lexington, Kentucky and studied history and art history at the University of Kentucky. Coke studied photography in New York at the Clarence H. White School of Photography and furthered his photographic education under Ansel Adams in the 1950s. In 1958 he received his MA in art history and MFA in sculpture from Indiana University, later pursuing a doctorate in art history at Harvard. Coke taught as an assistant professor at the University of Florida, as an associate professor at Arizona State University, and as a professor of art at the University of New Mexico.

While at UNM Coke served as founding director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, to which he donated more than 1,200 objects from his own collection. Coke served as deputy director and director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY beginning in 1970, and worked as curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1979-1987. His own photographic practices mirrored those of the Surrealists; he used 19th-century negatives along with his own manipulated prints to create elements of graphic design in his work. Coke also used methods including solarization, montage, and printmaking to create photographs and was a proponent for experimental approaches to photography. He died in New Mexico in July 2004.