Vivid Portrayals of Asheville’s African American History – The Isaiah Rice Photo Collection – To Be First Exhibit at New Eagle Market Community Exhibition Space

The Isaiah Rice Photo Collection, which provides a window into Asheville’s African American history through vivid images of life in the city’s black community from the 1950s through the 1970s, will be on view May 24-Aug. 24 at the new Eagle Market Place Community Exhibition Space, 19 Eagle Street, Asheville. An opening reception will be held at the exhibition space from 5:30-8 p.m. on Friday, May 24. The reception and exhibit are free and open to everyone.

The opening reception will be hosted by UNC Asheville’s Office of Community Engagement and its Executive Director Darin Waters. Waters, also an associate professor of history at the university, is the grandson of photographer Isaiah Rice, and his family has donated the complete collection of photos to the university’s Ramsey Library so they may be preserved and made available to the public.

The exhibition at the Eagle Market Place Community Exhibition Space will feature large reproductions of more than 40 photos by Rice, a serious amateur photographer who worked not only with Kodak and Polaroid cameras, but a German Zeiss/Ikon twin reflex camera, and a late 1950s “spy” camera about the size of a pack of gum.

Rice graduated from Stephens-Lee High School, then worked for the WPA (the federal Works Progress Administration, a program to aid recovery from the Great Depression), was drafted into the U.S. Army, and then worked as a deliveryman for a local beverage distributor until his death in 1980. His photos show the everyday life of African Americans in Asheville, who at the time comprised roughly one-fifth of the city’s population at the time – a significant portion of the city’s people whose history has only recently begun to be adequately documented and chronicled.

In their Southern Cultures article about the collection, In-Between the Color Lines with a Spy Camera, Waters, along with UNC Asheville co-authors, Archivist Gene Hyde, and Professor of Political Science Kenneth Betsalel, wrote: “What is unusual in the Rice photographs is that we have a near complete family album, but one that extends beyond family members to those living in the immediate and extended community.”

Referencing W.E.B. DuBois’ description of America’s currents of black and white, they continued: “Rice’s photographs powerfully capture the way the world about him both ‘mingle their waters’ and ‘divide and flow wide apart’ along lines of race. There is a respectful distance in a Rice photograph, a sense of in-betweenness, and a sense of seeing the world as it is.”

The location of this exhibition also has historical significance. The Eagle Market Place Community Exhibition Space is part of the new apartment and retail development at Eagle and Market Streets, once the hub of Asheville’s African American commercial and social life. The project is a partnership between the nonprofit group, Mountain Housing Opportunities with its mission “to build and improve homes, neighborhoods, communities, and lives, and build hope and dignity in the people,” and Eagle Market Streets Development Corporation.

For more information, contact UNC Asheville’s Office of Community Engagement at 828.258.7695.