History Inspires Showcase featuring John Akre and Zed Saeed
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.