Not Yet / Always Been: An Archive of Queer Louisville

Not Yet / Always Been: An Archive of Queer Louisville  
September 12 - October 31, 2024
Reception: Thursday Sept. 12 | 4-6pm

Schneider Hall Galleries | Gallery X
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 

Not Yet / Always Been emerges from the classroom and the archives. The exhibition is a product of collaborative discussions and debates that a mixed graduate and undergraduate seminar provides. It showcases the material stuff of the Williams-Nichols Collection, yet it also puts on display the affective and imaginative—our creative processes of discovering hope and belonging in the archive. This project is a collective enterprise to envision from Louisville's queer past a future that complicates the normative scripts that dictate how a life should be lived. Mining the past, we reimagine how desire, intimacy, family and community take shape and appear in both the public and domestic sphere. 

Organized into five interconnected "stations," Not Yet / Always Been exhibits how queer life in Louisville can be traced, felt and experienced by making contact with the tangible evidence of its presence. Our stations—Voices, Performance, Terrain, Intimacy and Organizing—each carve out discrete segments of this presence. Ranging across photographs, film, clothing, newsprint, flyers, posters, handwritten letters and ephemera of all kinds from one of the nation’s largest queer archival collections, these stations provide the possibility for new orientations, connections and perspectives. 

Image: David Williams, "blessing party" from Lesbian Wedding series, 1986, William-Nichols Collection.

These photographs, taken by David Williams, capture the wedding and subsequent “blessing party” of Kate Murphy and Willie McAnally on June 7, 1986. They were married on a summer day in front of the fountain in the St. James Court of Old Louisville. This was a subversive act since gay marriage wouldn't be legally recognized in Kentucky until the decision of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.