In Memoriam: Thomas Barrow (1938-2024)

A celebration of Thomas Barrow’s life and career will be held on Sunday, September 22nd, from 2:00 – 4:00 PM in Keller Hall, located in the Center for the Arts, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

Barrow was born on September 24, 1938 in Kansas City, Missouri. He studied graphic design at Kansas City Art Institute graduating with a BFA in 1963. In 1965 he studied film at Northwestern University in Chicago and in 1967 he earned his MS in Photography from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied with Aaron Siskind.

He served as Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Associate Curator of Research Center at the George Eastman House (now Museum) and as a Lecturer in history and aesthetics of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Buffalo State University.

Barrow came to the University of New Mexico in 1973, when he accepted the position of Associate Professor of Art and Associate Director of the Art Museum (a position he held until 1976). In 1981, he was appointed Professor of Art & Art History and taught in the program until his retirement in 2001. During his teaching career, he remained connected to the Art Museum serving as Acting Director in 1985, Adjunct Curator of Photography in 2000 and a trusted advisor to multiple generations of the Art Museum’s directors and curators.

Barrow was a two-time recipient of NEA Visual Arts Grants and his artworks are in many public collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Victoria & Albert Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Barrow’s archive was established in 2005 at the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona.

In his retirement from UNM, Barrow served for over 10 years as Chair of the Albuquerque Museum’s Art Advisory Committee.

The UNM Art Museum is honored to hold 83 of Barrow’s artworks in the permanent collection that span his artistic career. Barrow and his wife Laurie have also donated 123 artworks, in a variety of mediums, from their personal collection.

“Tom was passionate about the past, present and future of the University of New Mexico Art Museum. He was an erudite, insightful and accomplished artist, scholar and administrator. In all of his endeavors, Tom excelled at discerning what was both individually distinctive and broadly meaningful. Alongside Van Deren Coke and Beaumont Newhall, Tom and his colleagues combined academic excellence with the Museum’s esteemed art collection, creating a foundational program that inspired multiple generations of UNM students to become rigorous and thoughtful scholars, artists and museum professionals. I am proud to count myself as one of those students.”

-Arif Khan,
Director,
UNM Art Museum

His career as an educator has been honored several times, including being named the Honored Photographer at the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) West/Southwest Conference in 1983, UNM Presidential Professorship Award in 1985, SPE Honored Educator in 2001 and UNM Professor Emeritus of Photography in 2002.

Barrow’s approach to teaching photography at UNM is best described by his friend and colleague Geoffrey Batchen:

“I first got to know Tom Barrow in 1996, when he and I bonded over our shared love of electric blues music during my reconnaissance visit to Albuquerque, just prior to taking up a teaching position at the University of New Mexico. I remember an undergraduate student sitting in my office gushing over having just seen the 1929 silent film “Pandora’s Box,” starring Louise Brooks. Tom happened to wander by my office, as he often did. Turns out he knew Louise Brooks (of course he did!), or, at least, had shared a dinner with her while working at Eastman House. He brought Lulu to life for that student. Tom’s lectures on the history of twentieth-century photography were full of similarly telling anecdotes about his peers, such as the story he told about taking Minor White to the best restaurant in Rochester and having him order nothing but a raw onion and a glass of water. He gave students a personal, subjective colour commentary on the world of artistic photography that complemented my more traditionally dispassionate chronological survey. For Tom, that history was a lived experience, not an academic one.

He brought that same hard-won life experience to his studio teaching. Tom came from a generation of artists who had fought to take back the apparatus of the art world from non-artists. Artists, he believed, should write and curate and publish and be historians and not be dependent on others to do that work for them. The photography program at UNM embodied that attitude, insisting that students be literate intellectuals as well as skilled craftspeople. It was a demanding program, asking for a written thesis from MFA students, the equivalent in length and rigor to that required by MA students in art history. It ensured that photography students were grounded in a history of their craft, exposing them to the lectures already described but also to actual prints in the art museum as well as to experimental and alternative processes in the studio.”

-Geoffrey Batchen
Professor of the History of Art,
Trinity College, University of Oxford

A celebration of Thomas Barrow’s life and career will be held on Sunday, September 22nd, from 2:00 – 4:00 PM in Keller Hall, located in the Center for the Arts, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.