Jim Dow | American, 1942 -
Born in Boston in 1942, Dow earned a BFA in graphic design and a MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and 1968, respectively. Walker Evans's seminal book American Photographs (1938) was an early influence. He recalls the appeal of Evans's "razor sharp, infinitely detailed, small images of town architecture and people. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss...pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative." Soon after graduate school, he had the opportunity to work with Evans and was hired to print his mentor's photographs for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
Dow has taught photography, photographic histories and contemporary art at Cooper Union, Harvard, Princeton, Vancouver School of Art & Design, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. His work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as Argentina, Canada, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Various projects have been supported by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Financial Times Magazine, the Joseph E. Seagram's Corporation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The New England Foundation for The Arts, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Polaroid Corporation, the Target Corporation, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, as well as numerous private and public organizations and individuals.
Monographs on Dow's work include: Marking the Land (2007); American Studies (2011) and Signs (2022). His work is in numerous public collections, including: Addison Gallery of American Art, Amon Carter Msueum, Art Institute of Chicago, Center for Creative Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, The Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Nelson-Atkins Museum among others.