Meet Featured Artist Barbara Van Cleve

Friday, Sep 13, 1-2pm
Booth 127

Presented by Andrew Smith Gallery. I want to capture the beauty of the landscape, the setting or rising of the sun, and the dust swirling as horses or cattle move across the terrain. I want people to see ranching as something different from the mythical image of the cowboy riding off into the sunset, brave, strong, and alone. There are also women doing half the work or even more.” Barbara Van Cleve – “Pure Quill: Photographs by Barbara Van Cleve”

About the Artist

“Barbara Van Cleve is the real deal. She has both the swagger and shyness of a true westerner. Her sense of the land and people combined with her sophisticated photographic techniques elevate her work into a special pantheon of legendary Western Landscape, Ranch, and Heritage Documentary Photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably L.A. Huffman, Evelyn Cameron, and Erwin Smith. Not only is she a brilliant photographer of the American West; she herself grew up in the saddle so that the authenticity in her work shows clearly from her lifetime of genuine experiences and insights. Unlike many tinhorn eastern photographers, who adopt the cowboy life as a romantic hobby, Van Cleve embraces the grit and substance of real western life. Her subjects are not sentimental objects, but rather friends and colleagues. Her black and white prints show more than any photographer of her generation, the true grandness and enthralling isolation and toughness of the American West.”  Andrew Smith, 2016

Barbara Van Cleve (b. 1835-) a lifelong resident of Big Timber, Montana is the primary Heritage photographer of Western Ranch life of the last 60 years.  World famous for her views of Ranch Women, Cowgirls, horse and cattle drives, the ballet of the rodeo, and her landscapes of the West, she recently sold her archive to the Montana Historical Society where it will be seen and enjoyed in perpetuity.

Her heritage is rich with family history and firsthand experience.  Her family ranch, the Lazy K Bar was founded by her grandparents in 1880 on the east slopes of the Crazy Mountains near Melville, Montana.

Her father, Paul “Spike” Van Cleve, was a unique combination of writer, poet, Harvard scholar, and expert horseman.  The author of two best sellers, “Forty Years Gatherins” and “A Day Late and A Short” Spike had Barbara riding by herself at the age of 3.  Spike had her doing ranch work at the age of six helping at the corrals. At the age of 11 her mother gave her a box Brownie camera and a kit for developing film and making prints.  Since that time she has photographed, generally from horseback, often at a full gallop.

Along the way she earned an MA in English (Victorian) Literature at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., taught English Literature and Photography for 25 years at DePaul University, Loyola University and Mundelein College, all in the Chicago area.  In her spare time she worked for Rand McNally as a textbook photographer and established a very successful stock photography agency, spending summers and holidays back at the ranch.

Among many publications most notable are Hard Twist: Western Ranch Women” (1995) and “Pure Quill: Photographs by Barbara Van Cleve” (2016).  She has been in over 160 one person and group exhibitions and her work is widely collected by Museums, Archives and individuals.

Copyright 2019 Barbara Van Cleve, “Noon Break”, 1981