Ahlborn, Richard E., 1933-2015
Biographical Note
Richard E. Ahlborn was born in 1933. Throughout his career, he was a specialist in Mexican American art. Prior to the 1950s, he served as a curator at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a photographer for the Department of Cultural History in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of History and Technology, later the National Museum of American History. In 1964, he took a position as a curator in for the museum, a job he held until his retirement in 2002. In 2005, Ahlborn donated his extensive slide collection, created over some 50 years of scholarship, to the Art + Architecture Library at Virginia Tech. His later research focused on the San Xavier del Bac mission church in Tuscon, Arizona, and its restoration. Ahlborn died in Maryland in 2015 at the age of 82.
Found in 1 Collection or Record:
Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection
The Richard E. Ahlborn Slide Collection contains more than 3,000 slides created and collected by Ahlborn over his extensive career as a photographer, curator, and scholar of Mexican American art. Slides include images of artworks, architecture, buildings (especially churches), towns, crafts/furniture, graphic art pieces, tools, textiles, and religious objects.