Join us for an evening of history inspired creativity in the
second part of our series showcasing the Filson’s History Inspires Fellowship (HIF)
recipients. This program features two of the 2024 cohort of fellows, John Akre
and Zed Saeed who will share with the public the materials researched in the
Filson’s collections and how the items were a source of motivation in their
artistic projects.
?John
Akre used items from the Filson collection to inspire the creation of two
stop motion animated movies. The first, "We Went to the Movies,"
illustrates passages from the diary of teenager John Mason Brown, who, in the
time he documented, 1915-1917, attended movies at downtown Louisville movie
theaters almost daily. Much of this film was created collaboratively with young
people at the Filson's Cultural Pass days this summer. The second film
documents the work and process of Ivey Watkins Cousins, who created a Google
Earth-like record of the streets of central Louisville in 1959-1963, right
before the completion of I-65 and the demolition of many of those
streets.
Zed Saeed’s project, “Walnut Street Revisited”, is
meant literally as a journey of re-visitation in the present. Being a
research-based photographer, he used the Filson archives to study portions and
places along the old Walnut Street to get a flavor of what existed in certain
sections of Walnut Street and who lived in other portions of it. Using
photography as his sole medium, some of his images are before/after shots,
while others examine the loss of an entire way of life, for which we only
gained empty parking lots. He was lucky enough to locate a few remaining
buildings from the heyday of Walnut Street, one of which became the focus of
his project. HIF allowed Zed to take a big first step in a direction that
he hopes to continue exploring and discovering with his camera.
The HIF program continues to build relationships with
artists by promoting the Filson Historical Society as a resource for artistic
scholarly research and inspiration.