Family Album: A Gift from E. Browning Coke

E. Browning Coke grew up in the 1950s on a farm on Georgetown Road with her brother Sterling, parents, and grandparents. Her father, Van Deren Coke, was a photographer, educator, and administrator who believed that “to learn about the world, you start in your own backyard.” He was the primary chronicler of his family, and his photographs convey an emotional complexity beneath the seemingly simple life of a child and the people and animals she cares most about. Portraits of young Browning are unmistakably scenes from Lexington, yet they indicate her father’s admiration for Edvard Munch, Minor White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and other modernist innovators. In 2025, E. Browning Coke gifted our Museum forty-six photographs by Van Deren Coke, who left Lexington in 1962 and went on to become the founding director of the University of New Mexico Museum of Art, director of the George Eastman Museum, and head of the photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Art. This exhibition highlights a selection of personal family photos from this gift, offering an intimate look at a prominent local family in the mid-twentieth century. 

IMAGES

Square: Van Deren Coke, Browning on a cold winter morning, 1953, gelatin silver print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, gift of E. Browning Coke. 

Landscape: Van Deren Coke, Browning and Sterling, Bloomington, Indiana, 1957, gelatin silver print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, gift of E. Browning Coke.