Friday, January 18, 2007 – Sunday, April 27, 2008

Holden Community Gallery

Ignatius Watsworth Brock (1866-1950) was a painter and poet, but he was best
known as a photographer whose approach was clearly rooted in Pictorialism.

Brock was born in Comfort, NC, near Jacksonville, but as a young man traveled to
New York City to study at Cooper Union Art Institute until he returned to his home
state to work as a photographer in New Bern. In 1897, Brock married Ora Koonce
and the two honeymooned in Asheville where the couple later relocated and he
opened a studio in the Swananoa-Berkeley Hotel on Biltmore Avenue.

Brock’s photographs included staged painterly portraits, mountain landscapes and
genre scenes marketed to tourists. In Brock’s work, we see Asheville of an earlier
age through the eyes of a man who clearly loved to create images of the world
around him.

This exhibition is organized and curated by the Asheville Art Museum.

This project is sponsored in part by the Judy Appleton Memorial Fund.

Image credit:

Nace Brock
Declaring a Dividend, 1901
Photogravure
5.5 x 6.75 inches
Private Collection