Held in the ASC galleries through Dec. 16, the exhibit will open with a reception on July 14 at 5 p.m. featuring the dedication and renaming of the Photographic Archives gallery in Friedman’s honor.

Friedman’s sister, Carol Abrams, donated the bulk of his artistic works to the Photographic Archives after his passing in 2017.

“Julius loved to mentor students and fellow artists. In giving his work to the Archives and Special Collections, students can learn from his work,” she said.

Abrams also provided support to renovate the gallery, enhance storage for ASC’s photographic holdings, including Friedman’s work, and prepare the collection for research by the community. This preparatory work is ongoing, and the full collection is expected to be open to the public in 2023.

Beloved by the local arts community, Friedman also was highly regarded among international audiences. Perhaps best known for the posters “Fresh Paint” and “Toe on Egg,” Friedman created posters and other graphic works for a broad range of clients. Outside of his design work, Friedman created his own artwork through photography – often printing on unique surfaces like metals and fabrics – as well as sculpture, furniture design, collage, book art and collaborative video. While this exhibit focuses on his early posters, the collection includes this broad range of media and formats.

“Julius Friedman was such a significant figure in our local arts scene,” said ASC Director Carrie Daniels. “We are delighted to serve as the home of his archive, and to present a slice of it to the community in this exhibition.”

Friedman was a graphic design graduate of UofL and had a decades-long relationship with the University Libraries. His work frequently appeared in ASC exhibits, including a 2012 celebration of Photographic Archives’ 50^th Anniversary, which featured Friedman’s photographic capture of a ballet dancer in mid-swirl. Friedman’s close friend, former Art Library Director Gail Gilbert, inspired one of Friedman’s later efforts, a project titled The Book. Gilbert suggested that Friedman create works of art from old books that otherwise would have been thrown away, and he ran with the project, taking old books, tearing them, twisting them, boring into them, reconstituting them and creating art. The Book consists of 130 photographs of that art.

Among ASC’s digital offerings are two recordings of conversations between Abrams and ASC archivist and local historian Tom Owen. In them, Abrams discusses her memories of growing up with Julius, her older brother and only sibling, and how she came to work alongside him in his studio and then gallery to exhibit and sell his work commercially. Abrams recounts observing her brother’s talent burgeoning in childhood and watching him become successful as an adult. She also talks about establishing a nonprofit foundation in her brother’s name to help young people pursue academic degrees in the arts, the .

The Early Poster Designs of Julius Friedman, 1965-1980 will run July 14-Dec. 16 in the Julius Friedman Gallery, on the lower level of Ekstrom Library on UofL’s Belknap campus.��

During World War II, the university was part of the V-12 program, which not only infused UofL with students, but also enabled the university to build its first dorms to accommodate them. ��

A fire destroyed a student cafeteria in 1951, shifting a centralized socializing spot to a former Navy V-12 mess hall, where it stayed until 1959.

The floods of 1937 and 2009 affected a majority of the Louisville community, including UofL’s campuses. In 2009, UofL closed many of Belknap buildings for repair and moved employees into alternative locations, like trailers, to work. ��

Nothing, however, comes close to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, much of the university – from classes to business operations and everything in between – shifted entirely online as part of a statewide stay-at-home mandate.

Not only were operations upended, so too were basic milestones. The Class of 2020 never got to walk across the stage at the Yum! Center. Internships abruptly ended. UofL Basketball never experienced the madness of March.

And so forth.

How do you possibly explain this unprecedented experience for posterity? UofL’s Archives and Special Collections and the are trying to do just that with their requests for the UofL community’s experiences and reflections of life during the pandemic.

Archives and Special Collections started its call to action in late March and continues to seek submissions. According to Carrie Daniels, university archivist and director, the idea behind launching this collection was built on experience from past disruptions (namely, the floods of 1937 and 2009), and by benchmarking other universities, like UNC Charlotte and Harvard, doing similar projects.

“We knew that in the future, community members and historians in general would want to know about people’s experiences at this time. Collections like this also serve as a centerpiece for remembering,” she said. “The materials can provide a sort of touchstone for people to remember and process their own stories, or to recount and make sense of family stories that have come down from previous generations.”

These types of hand-me-down recounts have happened frequently with the flood of 1937, in particular, she said. By the time of the 2009 flood, many materials moved to a digital format, which creates a different experience for posterity. This disparity informed Archives and Special Collections on how to approach its COVID-19 collection.

“For the flood of 1937, we are still getting donations of photographs taken, diaries kept and newspapers clipped. Digital files are not as hardy,” Daniels said. “Photographs and video taken with cell phones, blog posts and the like can be very ephemeral. We have all had the experience of corrupted digital files we can’t open, or photos that don’t get transferred onto a new device. So we really wanted to be proactive, asking people to donate materials while events were still unfolding, or to consciously preserve and hold on to them to donate later.”

Still, the department is collecting any format – photos, videos, textual documents like diaries, audio files, art, name it.

“People document and process experiences in a variety of ways, and we didn’t want to place restrictions on what we would accept,” Daniels said.

So far, the themes that have emerged from submissions have largely resonated with what “our own” feelings have been through this moment, she said. The department has received images of empty grocery store shelves and an empty campus, for example. ������

The project is ongoing, since events are still unfolding. Right now, the plan is to collect and preserve the material, then open it up to the public based on permissions from donors.

Simultaneously, UofL is also serving as a preservation and access partner for the Frazier Museum for a similar project. The museum began reaching out to the community around the same time the university launched its call to action. UofL is providing digital preservation expertise and access to digital and analog content for the long term. Daniels said there is a plan to partner on an exhibit eventually, but adds any such event “will have to wait until the community is healed enough, when there is enough distance that we can reflect, and not resurface trauma.”

From her unique perspective, Daniels said this experience feels more like the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than it does, for example, the floods of 1937 or 2009.

“With the floods, the waters soon receded and we got on with the very positive task of rebuilding,” she said. “The period of time where people’s lives were threatened was, in relation to the current pandemic, rather brief.”

Conversely, like Sept. 11, the pandemic has changed the way we interact with each other and the world.

“We are part of the world and are not immune – literally – to the things that plague the rest of the world,” she said. “A sense of safety has been lost, maybe irretrievably.”

The project originated with Marvin Maxwell, a drummer and founder of Mom’s Music, who purchased the master tapes in 2005 and has since released or re-released several recordings commercially with his partner, Walker “Ed” Amick. Maxwell has now sought ASC’s assistance in preserving the tapes.

Once a fixture in the local music scene and perhaps the oldest recording studio in the area, the Allen-Martin Studio was begun in the mid-1950s under a different name, eventually moving to 9912 Taylorsville Road until it closed in 1999.

The Allen-Martin Studio Collection includes recordings of most of the prominent bands who performed and recorded in Louisville during the 1960s, as well as popular national acts, said Jeff Jobson, a music chronicler and aficionado who is collaborating with ASC personnel to help catalogue the tapes.

“This was an especially exciting time, since it was not uncommon for local Top 40 DJs to manage local��bands and ‘just happen’ to give them a goodly amount of airplay,” before the rules changed in the 1970s and the practice was no longer allowed.

Not only are bands from the beginning of Top 40 radio in Louisville included, but also ephemera such as commercials and industrial information tapes.

“It covers a lot of people’s collective memories from their most formative years,” Jobson said. “I don’t know if I’m even able to convey the historical value of these tapes, as this lays the groundwork for nearly all the rock and roll history of the Louisville area.”

Jobson is currently also collaborating with ASC’s����to provide access to interviews with local musical artists. In the interviews “many of them refer to the period of time in their youth when they had their collective ears glued to WAKY/WKLO. And with each mention, they stress the influence of that time in what they brought to the music scene. And those musicians impressed later musicians, and so on to the present��day. This is Ground Zero for Louisville’s local rock music, which begat all of the underground scene which followed.”

Groups or artists among the collection include:

Copperfield
Quick Draw
Tim Krekel
Lester Flatt
Merseybeats
Carnations
Rugbys
H. Fuqua (Harvey Fuqua)
Brothers Pride
Monarchs
Bodeco
Premiers (Ali Shuffle)
Howie Gano
Crushed Velvet
Buster Brown
Will Cary
Names
Dorothy Boy
Freddy George
Exiles/Exile
Another Mule
Cosmo
Chukkar
Kenny and the Accents
Troy Shondell
Trendells

But the spring of 2020 is anything but normal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the way UofL operates. Students and faculty have shifted to online learning and teaching at the drop of a dime, while staff members adjust to working from home. And yet, our Cardinal Family has faced these changes with open minds and is soaring to new (social distanced) heights.

To document these changes, Archives and Special Collections is seeking the UofL community’s experiences and reflections of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Documented experiences could range from direct observations to artistic reflections on topics such as working from home, the shift to online teaching, social distancing and self-quarantine and leading the university through the crisis.

Rebecca Pattillo, a metadata librarian for Archives and Special Collections, believes these changes and new experiences are important to document for future generations to look back on.

“Major events throughout history are often researched through primary sources that are created at the time of the event,” Pattillo said. “Many are turning to other major pandemics, such as the 1918 Influenza, to see how communities experienced, coped and banded together. COVID-19 will be no different.”

Pattillo also shared how the collection of experiences will benefit the UofL community.

“This documentation will allow people within and outside of the university to reflect back on this time and how we reacted to and made sense of our changed lives,” Pattillo said. “These experiences will serve as ‘raw data’ for understanding how the move to online learning and teaching affected students and professors, how the transition to work from home or loss of income affected employees, and how administrators reacted during a time of crisis.”

So far, Archives and Special Collections has received photos and videos of empty grocery store shelves and a deserted Belknap campus, as well as written reflections, including a letter someone wrote to their future self. The following is an excerpt from a written submission by Kelly Hill, a PhD student in the College of Arts and Sciences:

“As a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student, I should be writing my dissertation, but my historical novel is about 19th century women who were quarantined in a home when they were pregnant, and all of a sudden, this feels a little on the nose.”

Pattillo and the Archives and Special Collections team encourages everyone in the UofL community to document their personal COVID-19 experiences.

“Everyone, whether they are a student, faculty, staff or administrator should share their experience,” Pattillo said. “By having a wide breadth of submissions, future generations will have a greater understanding of COVID-19’s full impact on the UofL community.”

Archives and Special Collections will eventually make the collection open to the public for research, but the details are still being worked out.

To submit your personal experience of life during COVID-19, use .��

The Lonesome Pine Special concert series ran in 1984 through 2000 at the Bomhard Theater in the Kentucky Center for the Arts. With a mission to be a musical “all things considered” platform for rising stars, underappreciated veterans and unique voices, it attracted numerous national acts such as Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang and They Might Be Giants.

The success of the concert series led to broadcasts on National Public Radio and PBS, airing in over 180 markets and five countries.

The series was created and programmed by Van Kleeck, who then served as the programming director for the Kentucky Center. The exhibition will feature more than 70 images by Bram, mostly in black and white.

“Archives and Special Collections is honored to preserve the legacy of this significant cultural chapter of local history. Bram and Van Kleeck’s work is right at home in the Photographic Archives and we encourage everyone to view the rich tapestry of performers that made up the Lonesome Pine Special series,” said Elizabeth Reilly, Photographic Archives curator.

Van Kleek returned to Louisville in 2014 after 13 years as director of concerts at the Bienen School of Music and the Davee Distance Learning Initiative, Northwestern University.

“I discovered that there was still a lot of interest and fond memories related��to the Lonesome Pine Specials concert series. I knew Richard Bram had many wonderful photographs from the series��that had not��been shown. I also had many hours of video from the Lonsome Pine Specials PBS series. This seemed like a perfect match, to combine the Bram photos��and a new retrospective live action video I have editd into one exhibit that would celebrate an important part of Louisville’s rich cultural history circa 1984-2000,” he said.

There will be an 3-6 p.m. Jan. 26 in Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium. Bram will speak, as well as Van Kleeck, who will also air the film he edited. Other speakers include Bob Hill, former columnist for The Courier-Journal; Leslie Stewart, former WFPL host; and John Timmons, WFPK host and founder of ear X-tacy Records. Composer and violinist Scott Moore will perform a new work inspired by the diversity of musical styles presented on the concert series.

“I am very pleased that the UofL Photo Archives and Special Collections will include this cultural story, these photographs and the video in their nationally celebrated collections. It is indeed an honor. In fact, this exhibit is a rounding of a circle. Each season, over sixteen years, the series featured a brilliant photo from the UofL Photo Archives,” Van Kleeck said. “I am especially��pleased that new generations will be introduced to this series, and also to many outstanding artists that they may not have known about before seeing this exhibit.”

University Libraries has just made it much easier to discover them with a release of a new digital exhibit –��

Lost Louisville uses photographs from Archives and Special Collections and a mapping software called Story Maps to easily display where old buildings once stood.��

Terri Holtze, head of web services at University Libraries, said the map allows people to ponder important questions about the built environment like: Why were these buildings singled out for demolition? Which of them suffered natural catastrophes? Why do certain neighborhoods have so many buildings missing? Why have many of the buildings been replaced by parking lots? What does it all mean in terms of livability for citizens?

“I hope people use the site to explore these images and think about the implications of a changing building-scape in the neighborhoods of Louisville,” Holtze said.

Phase I, which is available now, focused on the areas of the city from Broadway to the Ohio River and from Beargrass Creek to the river. More than 1,100 images cover neighborhoods from Shawnee to Butchertown. About 50 images marked with a star indicate links to interactive sliders that compare the historic photos to recent images of the area.��

Research on Phase II has already begun to expand the project.

“In future phases we hope to add essays by experts that will interpret these maps and photos through the lenses of architecture, local history and urban planning,” Holtze said.

Artifacts range from a t-shirt that jokingly asks “Who the hall is Tilda Threkald?” to a flag from Louisville Municipal College, a separate UofL campus for African American students until integration, to a typewriter pulled from the wreckage of the Student Union Building when it burned in 1951.

The show’s photographs range from black and white images from the 1930s to photos from last year’s Crawfish Boil.

There is also a digital carousel with 250 images of UofL athletics.

“It is a broad look at 90 years of student life at UofL that includes three exhibit areas,” said Tom Owen, archivist.

The show was a group effort from staff and faculty within ASC and was largely inspired by Welcome Week.

“We asked, what do we want students to see? And, the answer was, themselves! We wanted them to see student life here,” said Jennifer Oberhausen, libraries assistant.

Viewers will notice commonalities and traditions that carry through the ages and also the unique spin each generation puts on their UofL experience.

New students are encourage to see the show and also check out the library during its annual .

“Your undergraduate years can be a time of exploration, of learning from people who are different from you – and finding and connecting with folks who share your interests,” said Carrie Daniels, director of ASC. “It’s a time of building your skills and practicing ways to change the world for the better. It’s a time of pushing yourself intellectually, spending time in – of all places – that temple of learning, the library.”

More than 100 years ago, in the fall of 1913, Florence Daisy McCallum began her career as a University of Louisville student and joined the “girls’ basket ball team.” She chronicled the team’s triumphs and defeats, as well as their exploits off the court, in her “Basket Ball Journal.” The journal is available in��as part of the����digital collection.

Highlights include documentation of the team’s handy defeat of University Kentucky – known then as State University – at Lexington in January 1914, with a repeat the next month on our home court. UofL’s women had lost to UK the previous year, but the January win was so complete (with a score of 23 to 12) that “it well wiped out all memory of past defeats.”

Our women’s and men’s teams also played each other that year — the men defeated the women 40-14. In addition to documenting the final (and disappointing) score in that game, this scrapbook tells the story of how these young people interacted. There are cartoons that hint at some interesting “guarding” of members of the opposite team, and others that underscore the height differences between the men and the women. It is apparent that these students knew each other well, and that they shared camaraderie as much as competition.

Given that there were only 203 students enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences, it is not surprising that they knew each other well. ��At least one member of the team, Charlotte Wimp, met her husband, Donald Butler, through basketball.

While the scrapbook holds many wonderful photographs of the team (sometimes including someone’s dog – a mascot, perhaps?), the cartoons drawn of various events are especially sweet. In some cases their message is easy to read (for example, the cartoons from the game played between the men and women), and at other times they refer to what must have been inside jokes. But even though the specific meaning of these cartoons is lost, anyone who has been a teenager can relate to the image of “Shrimp” quaking before her “Ma” – while it’s not clear whether she is coming or going, she is definitely afraid she is in trouble.

Scrapbooks like this, which are not just collections of newspaper clippings or photographs, but also contain commentary and other personal touches, help give us a sense of what it was like to be a student in earlier days. They show us what is different, and what is still very much the same.

is sponsoring Historical Walking Tours through Belknap campus��12-12:50 p.m. every Wednesday from Oct. 4 to Nov. 15. Those interested in participating just need to meet up at the Ekstrom Library Porch (interior of campus side, across from Humanities Building).

The tours will be lead by , veteran walking tour raconteur and local historian, who has been an archivist at UofL’s for 42 years.

“This is a 50-minute opportunity for people to learn something new, appreciate campus and get a little exercise,” Owen said. “I am always struck by the university as a destination — the water features, the pendulum, the plantings, the flower beds, there’s just so much to see and enjoy.”

Owen is especially well-versed in campus history now as he’s been working with Archives and Special Collections colleague Sherri Pawson to pen a new history book, “.” The 128-page book from Arcadia Publishing’s “Campus History Series” is set for release Dec. 4, just in time for the holidays.

“I knew a lot before, but I learned a lot of new things preparing this book, no question,” he said.

One aspect he’ll focus on is the core eight buildings that existed when the university moved onto the site in 1925, and what other buildings have been absorbed into campus through the years and adapted to fit campus needs.

On a recent episode of “UofL Today with Mark Hebert,” Owen and filmmaker Morgan Atkinson talked about recently donating more than 50 hours of interviews with Owen to UofL Archives and Special Collections. Owen and Atkinson discuss the project which dates back to 1990.