LINE BYLINE

Subtitles Available on YouTube

THE RESEARCH

& CURATORIAL TEAM

Erica Lewis

University of Louisville Interdisciplinary & Public Humanities

Emilie Zengel

Undergraduate Researcher & Zine Writer

Chad Kamen

University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections

Piper Greeby

Undergraduate Researcher & Panel Coordinator

William Smith

Portland Museum

Sunny Hearld

Undergraduate Researcher & Portland Museum Intern

LOCAL

the panel

"Carrying the Message: The Power of Local Press"

was hosted in the backyard of the Portland Museum alongside the opening reception of the Line Byline exhibition. The speakers featured historians and founders

of several publications featured in the project's research.

The panel was moderated by Mark Mattes, English professor at the University of Louisville and founder

of the local letterpress print shop Hot Brown Press.

Jose Neil Donis

Al Día en América

Aukram Burton

The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage

Spencer Jenkins

Queer Kentucky

Mary Johnson

The Disability Rag

the exhibit

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Line Byline centers community voices in Louisville print, ranging in materiality from hand-engraved portraits to photo-copied zines 100 years later, with the constant of putting physical articulations of ideas from these makers’ hands to their neighbor’s. Across the hands of the writing messengers, the multiplying makers, and the community audiences, we can trace the labors of love put into amplifying tactile connections to one another in the writing, the editing, the printing, the distributing, and the reading—all of which is done line by line.

These local publications took it upon themselves to answer a community need in the face of systemic exclusions and misrepresentations. In the face of their deprioritized (if included at all) representation, storytelling, and access, these communities rallied behind localized grassroots efforts—often in their own limited time, resources, and funds—committing to a labor of love in service to each other. Inherent to the medium, accessibility is a unifying pursuit of these publications, seeking access for themselves that previously did not exist—be it confronting harmful narratives, highlighting excluded voices, translating articles into languages beyond English, or offering accommodations to visual media. Utilizing print not only allowed for the amplification of these voices before the internet, but also fostered a sense of interpersonal validation by producing something that could be physically held and cherished. Because of these practices of personal and community preservation, these printed artifacts have survived as a continued veneration of their impact on Louisville’s history.

Within hyperlocal spaces, touch becomes an intimate trace of relationality that print as a medium captures, particularly in archival research. Archives not only protect the objects within them, but also the everyday remnants left behind from human interaction in the articles cut from their published context, the newspapers torn along their original fold lines, the pages dog-eared in a well-loved book, and the names underlined in hopes of a future reflection. Across their situation in time and space, physical media manifests the stories within the texts, within the objects, and within the memories instilled into those objects.

Today, we have seen the fragility of digital communication with the rise of targeted erasure and mass censorship. Print not only offers a tangible tether to our community in its concrete practicality, but it also preserves a handheld assertion of self that can be shared with the world free of external mediation or permission. As evident in our selection of artifacts, Louisville has seen a rich history of socially impactful printmaking. These communities have been here and will continue to enrich our city with their voices and our increased access to reading and hearing them. This collection hopes to not only celebrate these histories in response to contemporary social climates, but also to forge a sense of community coalition unified by common themes of dignity, pride, access, and amplification. With growing emphasis on the digital and the individual, this exhibition offers a medium of tactile creative expression and practical multiplication in hopes of revitalizing print as an accessible, communal means of documenting stories and collaborative expression.