Ron Tarver
Ron Tarver (Philadelphia, PA) is an internationally recognized lens-based artist and educator. Tarver received a BA in Journalism and Graphic Arts from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK and an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. He is Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, PA.
Before joining the faculty at Swarthmore, he was a staff photojournalist at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 32 years. While at the The Inquirer, Tarver won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system. During that tenure, 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 a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Independence Foundation, and Pew Foundation Fellowship, 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, Philadelphia, PA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
Tarver's latest book, The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America, was released in spring 2025. He is also the co-author of We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans (2005, Harper Collins).
