2025 Exhibition: Lost in the (re)Process

Loss in the (re)Process | Cressman Center 

October 3-November 8, 2025

This exhibition sheds light onto Louisville’s evolution in the 20th century through urban renewal practices via three models: the first is an artistic intervention by Cassidy Meurer into the Urban Renewal Commission Photograph Collection, housed at UofL Archives & Special Collections. Appraisal survey photographs taken by the city’s Urban Renewal Commission are collaged together to reimagine the streets of downtown Louisville as they once existed, interrogating notions of progress. The second mode utilizes photographs of urban renewal demolitions made by photojournalists working for the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times from the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal photograph collection, demonstrating the violence of these displacement practices and painting a backdrop for the city’s civil rights movement. The final mode brings us to the “now” of the narrative; video installations and 3D mapping by Shachaf Polakow bring the Downtown Louisville streets of today into the gallery space, squishing the temporal gaps between the archival material on display and our current reality.

Image: Cassidy Meurer, 600 Block of West Walnut Street, North side, collaged survey photographs taken by the Louisville Urban Renewal Commission