Barbara Van Cleve
Photographer and Educator
Sweet Grass County High School, 1953
If freedom had a voice, it would sound like Barbara Van Cleve’s – full of laughter, wisdom, and possibility. And if it could see, it would look like the view from her home: the Absaroka, Crazy, and Beartooth Mountains stretching wide in every direction. Barbara’s life is a testament to what public education offers – the freedom to chart your own course and the hard work and courage it takes to do it.
Born in 1935 and raised on the Lazy K Bar Ranch near Melville, Montana, Barbara’s childhood reads like a Western novel. She was responsible for 98 horses and rode to school on horseback, 45 minutes each way. “Unless I was dilly-dallying around,” she says, “which was my inclination.”
In winter, neighbors took turns hooking up sleighs to collect the handful of kids who made up the one-room schoolhouse. “It was really booming if we had 12,” she laughs. Her closest friends? “Horses,” she says matter-of-factly.
At 11, she saw Life magazine for the first time and begged her parents for a camera. “I couldn’t draw or paint, and I thought, how will I show people how wonderful this life is?” That camera never left her hand or her saddle.
After graduating from Sweet Grass County High School, and then college in Illinois, Barbara told her parents she was going to be a photographer. They encouraged teaching, so she earned a master’s in English at Northwestern and taught for 25+ years at schools like DePaul and Loyola, spending summers on the ranch with her horses and her camera.
But in 1980, she made the leap. By 1985, her first solo show launched a legendary career: 60+ solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions. All shot from horseback in Sweet Grass County. She was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1995 and won the Wrangler Award in 2016. A documentary of her life premieres this year.
“It was a wonderful life.”
And how lucky we are that she shared it.
