Lost in the (re)Process
Challenging Constructions of Downtown Louisville, 1959-1974.
An interview between Sarah Melloy and Cassidy Meurer.
Lost in the (re)Process: Challenging Constructions of Downtown Louisville, 1959-1974, is a Louisville Photo Biennial exhibit featuring work by Cassidy Meurer and Shachaf Polakow, along with photographic materials from the University of Louisville’s Archives & Special Collections. It developed out of Cassidy Meurer’s 2024 Master’s thesis in art history at the Hite Institute of Art + Design. Just as its title promises, this exhibition interrogates how the mid-century process of Urban Renewal led to the configuration of Louisville’s downtown landscape today. The artists’ fragmented and distorted renderings intersperse photographic documentation pulled from the archives, opening a portal to a reimagined future.
This show is on view at the Cressman Center for Visual Art from October 3rd through November 8th.
I had a chance to interview Cassidy Meurer, Archivist for the Courier-Journal Photograph Collection in UofL’s Archives & Special Collections, and the curator/artist behind Lost in the (re)Process: Challenging Constructions of Downtown Louisville, 1959-1974. It was a pleasure to hear some of Cassidy’s insights and processes for creating this show!
- Sarah Melloy
Sarah Melloy [SM]: This exhibition developed out of your 2024 Master's thesis, where you combined artistic, scholarly, and archival work to reprocess the Urban Renewal collection. Can you talk a little bit about what that collection entails and the decisions that led to developing the exhibition?
Cassidy Meurer [CM]: The Urban Renewal collection entails about 2,500 survey photographs of the areas in downtown Louisville that were cleared by our local urban renewal agency with federal funding. These survey photographs are a thorough depiction of these neighborhoods on the brink of their nonexistence through the city’s Urban Renewal agency. This collection serves as documentation of these areas prior to their destruction. They include the Riverfront, East Downtown, and West Downtown Project Areas, a cumulative 600+ acres.
The collection also contains some reference files containing project area maps that notated the organizational system developed by Urban Renewal, which broke up city blocks into unintelligible rectangles with arbitrary numbering systems that, when looking at the collection, made zero sense to researchers and archivists, even with the maps in hand.
SM: It sounds like they had a specific purpose that was not necessarily in the best interest of people living there at the time or researchers now.
CM: Exactly. It was an abstraction, basically, a way for them to collapse the humanity of the city into these series of numbers and shapes, to make it easier for them to achieve the aims of the projects.
SM: So, how did you get from the point of wanting to reprocess the Urban Renewal collection from an archivist’s perspective, to this art exhibit with the collection?
CM: Reprocessing the collection entailed reorganizing the collection outside of Urban Renewal’s organization system, and instead sequenced the survey photographs into streets as a pedestrian would experience them. That reorganization made a picture of the city appear from these fragmented photographs. I felt like there was so much evidence of a thriving community in downtown Louisville that, growing up a lifelong Louisville resident, I've never felt. To me, understanding that these parts of Louisville had been intentionally removed made the current organization of our city make more sense. It’s part of the answer to the question: How did we get to where we are now? I felt that if I had the opportunity to display parts of this collection in a public space, it could be an educational moment to illustrate what we've lost.
SM: At what point were you thinking “I want to write about this and make it into an academic project?”
CM: My first introduction to this collection was actually through another curatorial project. In 2021, Shachaf Polakow, the artist that is also featured in this exhibition, asked me to contribute some archival photographs for a show he was working on for the Louisville Photo Biennial, titled From the West End to the West Bank: Racism, Resistance and Oppression. Researching and pulling images for that exhibition was the first time I looked into the Urban Renewal Collection. Even though we included a fair number of Urban Renewal images in the 2021 exhibition, there was so much more in the collection that deserved to be highlighted. So that was the impetus for digitizing the collection, and it was through that process that I took on reprocessing the collection and it became more of a thesis project.
SM: In your thesis, you note that your artistic explorations arose from an “archival impulse.” Can you share a bit more about that impulse in the process for creating the collages?
CM: As I was working on the reorganization of the collection, a picture of the city streets began to emerge from the individual images. I had this desire to collage them together in a way that made the street become clearer, and remove the barriers of the photograph that were preventing that from happening. Hal Foster's essay, An Archival Impulse, was crucial in providing the framework for the collages and the thesis project. The essay describes this artistic drive to “connect what can't be connected.” I felt like that description really fit what I was trying to do with the Urban Renewal photographs because the record exists as it is - it has gaps, it’s incomplete.
But also on the streets that were thoroughly documented, attempting to collage them still produces fragmentation and abstraction because these images just don't fit together. They're separate moments that are trying to be transposed on top of each other, which is a bit of an impossible task. Foster states that “archival artists seek to make historical information that is often lost or displaced physically present.” While the Urban Renewal collection is definitely not lost, it was somewhat displaced in its disorganized state. It wasn't getting the attention that other collections depicting similar areas were getting. I wanted to make the research potential, but also the emotional potential, of this collection very visible through the thesis project and artistic intervention into the collection.
SM: Shachaf Polakow's 3D scans, algorithmic photography and video bring the exhibition into the present. How do these contemporary interventions converse with the historical material?
CM: My thesis was very grounded in this historical moment of Urban Renewal from the late 50s through the early 70s. I found that when thinking about an exhibition that is meant to be seen by the public, there should be a tie-in to today, a then and now kind of picture. I thought of Shachaf because of our prior collaboration, how he uses new media technologies in his work, and because he is an artist invested in the potential of social justice through artmaking. I asked him to create some work in response to the research and collaged works that I’ve made.
What resulted was Shahaf and I going to the areas that are depicted in the Urban Renewal collection as they are now, and looking at the landscape for what it is. Shachaf used 3D scanning technology as well as a drone – tools that are often used by powerful groups to monitor communities. In some ways, the technologies that he was using are the evolved technologies of what the Urban Renewal Commission agency used to create the collection.
SM: One of the panoramic photographs where you can see the highway and it takes up a third of the photo, I think really powerfully speaks to what you're talking about. Even in just this one photo, you can see it's just unusable land, and there's barely any cars using the highway at the time it was taken.
CM: I also love that photo because the highway comes down as a grounding point for the image, but the vanishing point is Ninth Street, which is colloquially known as 9th Street Divide and was right in the middle of the West Downtown Project Area. That divide was created through the urban renewal practices of the 60s, and only made worse in the time since. So I think that image really speaks to how things feel now and how we understand downtown today.
On the note of bringing the exhibition into the present, I’d like to bring in another quote from Hal Foster. He described successful archival art as creating “found arcs of lost moments” where the here and now of the work functions as a possible “portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.” If I could steal his words, that would really be the thesis of the exhibition and what the work is trying to get at.
SM: Thinking of this exhibit as an artistic portal is amazing. We want to use these historical materials to time travel, but we can't. But then the art gives you the container for it, the reopened future.
SM: In addition to the urban renewal photographs and artistic interventions, you included other archival sources that relate to life in the area pre-urban renewal project. How did these additional sources change the way we view the urban renewal collages or other aspects of the exhibition?
CM: Some of the other archival sources that I used were photographs of what happened to the neighborhoods as urban renewal was taking shape. The Courier-Journal photographs mostly depict demolitions of the same spaces that are represented in the Urban Renewal survey photographs. While they're displayed in an off-center way, they’re larger than life objects. They don’t let the viewer escape the reality of what actually happened. You'll notice as you walk through the exhibit, most of the Urban Renewal survey photographs are at eye-level, and these larger Courier-Journal photojournalistic images are at the periphery, but impossible to ignore. I really wanted to make the cost of urban renewal, in terms of what the community experienced and what it felt like, very visible in the show.
In the section with the collages of old Walnut Street, I really wanted to have perspectives represented that were not my own, because I did not and can not witness old Walnut Street in any capacity except through the record, the archives that we have. We're lucky to have a robust oral history collection at Archives & Special Collections. There are numerous interviews that speak not only to the legacy of old Walnut Street and act as memorials to that area, but also interviews that specifically talk about how Urban Renewal affected the community that surrounded Walnut Street. West Walnut Street was known as Louisville’s Black business district, and was a nexus of political and social activity for the Black community. In addition to including oral histories that discuss Walnut Street, I identified the businesses and individuals that lived on Walnut Street using the 1959 City Directory and included those notations directly underneath the collages. As you walk through this section of the exhibit, you can see there was everything you would need on that street alone. You wouldn’t have to go to another neighborhood to find basic necessities. I think that mixed use of space between business and residential in that neighborhood was what allowed it to be such a robust community, and so successful for so long. It probably would still be today if Urban Renewal hadn't happened.
SM: I ask because when I was viewing it, the oral histories and the mini, visual directories that you added from the city directories really invigorated the Walnut Street collages with life. Because there weren't people as subjects in the Urban Renewal photos, but there was so much humanity in them that you were able to put there from these very detached sources. The city directories are so detached, but you were able to piece together with the oral histories, which are embodied, what the experience might have been like for someone there. You were able to do that from this collection that focuses on the destruction of that community. So kudos.
CM: Well, that's great feedback because that was a big concern that I had going into staging this exhibition – the Urban Renewal collection is by design inhumane, that’s the nature of it. Any life that was captured in those photographs was accidental or happenstance, the collages reflected that. You can see some members of the community, which is a cool aspect, but that's not the primary takeaway from looking at those collages. I wanted to find some way to add humanity back in. I challenged myself to only use records from our archive to do that. I'm glad it’s still reading with a humane lens, even though these elements were pulled from the archive, and that's a testament to the importance of oral histories.
SM: It's nice to see an example of them being used in a way that invigorates other forms and mediums. This exhibition contains an interactive element where viewers may choose cutouts of reproductions that you've created and pin them on the gallery walls, where they can create their own collectively imagined street views. What was the motivation behind this, or did you have a desired outcome for this interactive element?
CM: The interactive element came last when curating the show. I had a bunch of extra bits from the Urban Renewal collection that I’d already cut out in preparation for collages, but hadn’t been able to use. In thinking about that Hal Foster quote, I wanted to have the work function as this portal between an “unfinished past and a reopened future.” The interaction is a charge to think creatively, and use the scraps from Urban Renewal to imagine an alternative way of organizing the city. The gallery space felt like a productive spot to engage the viewer in something more than just sadness or overwhelming defeat, but was maybe a way to think a little bit imaginative and generatively.
SM: I noticed in some spots people placed them extending into the window so they look like they’re going out into the city itself. The reimagining is happening in a place where there's all these tourist destinations that are not locally owned or operated even. This collectively imagined street view, it gets people thinking. I think you're onto something with the idea that you don't have to be an archivist in an institution or an artist or whatever to think creatively about these things and have a desire to go through that portal.
CM: Yeah. I think any exhibition that can engage the viewer in an active way will leave them thinking more critically and more deeply about what they've experienced. That was also a goal. It was also really exciting as the opening was happening to look around and see new things appear in the gallery space.
SM: Yeah, interactive elements can be really fun.
CM: I agree. There wasn’t a desired outcome besides this collective imagining and a little bit of levity too.
SM: I think that little bit of levity is important too when things are really, really heavy. To bring in a little joy or hope where you can and something actionable or tangible.
CM: Yes. It's an action. Sometimes it's hard to look at history and think, well, how does this apply to me now? It may not have a large effect, but this is a concrete way of taking an action, get the ball rolling.
SM: Exactly, it could be step one. Lost in the (re)Process is a pressing exhibition for our current moment in American and global history. How did today's political and social climate affect the curatorial decisions made in this exhibition?
CM: To come back to my earlier collaboration with Shachaf, the way I came to the Urban Renewal collection was through working on a comparative analysis of displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank with displacement of Black people in Louisville. Since that 2021 exhibition, the genocide in Gaza has been unfolding and the Israeli army has been destroying basically all of Gaza’s built environment, especially Gaza City. It was striking, unnerving and upsetting to see so many similarities in what has happened to our downtown Louisville due to decisions made by our governing powers – and see so many similarities, but at a much larger, catastrophic scale, to what is still happening today and ongoing. I think that displacement and the destruction of built environments is a violence that is often not described as such. This exhibition tries to depict that in a clear way, that this is a really real form of violence against communities.
I would also say that on a local level, the effects of Urban Renewal are still very much felt today. I mention in my thesis document that Breonna Taylor's family filed a lawsuit against the city because they recognized that Breonna's ex boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was being targeted for drug activities specifically because the house that he was renting was located within the Elliott Avenue Urban Renewal Project area. In July of 2020, shortly after LMPD killed Breonna, the city of Louisville obtained Walker's rented house for $1, and has owned it ever since. There have been no updates to that urban renewal project since 2020. The legacy of urban renewal actively continues in very, very harmful ways that have had ripple effects. Not just locally, not just in our city, but across the country and across the world. We really need to be holding our city officials accountable for decisions that are made when we know the history of similar decisions and the damage that they cause. And to not make those same decisions again, because it costs a lot. Knowing our history and being able to cite our sources, and point to these things as evidence is how we get people in power to listen.
This interview has been edited for brevity.
