Pure Process: Building a Julius Friedman Collection at the Filson Historical Society

The beauty of this, whatever you call this—I call it one hundred percent process—[is] I'm not having to frame this stuff. I don't have to worry about getting a gallery wanting to show this. I'm not trying to get a collector to hire us to do this installation. It's just pure process.

—Julius Friedman, describing his Rockopolis stone sculptures, in Julius Friedman: Picture This (2011)

Louisville artist and graphic designer Julius Friedman (1943–2017) was a beloved and renowned image maker and cultural advocate. During his fifty-year career, he embraced a range of media and methods to delight viewers with his visual artistry, and his iconic posters continue to hang in homes and classrooms throughout Louisville and across the world. Friedman's work in commercial advertising enabled him to offer pro bono design services to not-for-profit cultural organizations, which raised his profile and generated even greater demand for his professional services. Friedman was a wildly prolific artist who experimented extensively, constantly pushing the photographic medium and exploring book arts, sculpture, dance, and video. When Friedman died of a rare and aggressive form of leukemia in July 2017, at the age of seventy-four, he left behind a massive multimedia body of creative output and, perhaps just as importantly, a rich and vast network of friends, colleagues, and collaborators. Preserving the work and legacy of one of the area's most significant and influential artists is a necessarily collaborative project that encompasses multiple institutions, as well as Friedman's social and creative circles.

This essay offers an overview of the Julius Friedman Collection at the Filson Historical Society, including the first posthumous retrospective of Friedman's work. It describes the collection's scope and contents, with an emphasis on how this collection came to be and the ways it continues to grow. This focus on process enables us to learn more about the artist himself but also helps demystify the means through which collections develop. In the case of Julius Friedman—a process-oriented artist thoroughly embedded in Louisville's arts communities—curatorial methods that foreground process and collaboration are essential for documenting not only the artist's life and work but also the geographic, social, and cultural milieu in which he thrived.

The extensive oeuvre of a prolific and experimental creator whose work straddled fine art and commercial domains presents challenges and opportunities for collecting institutions, making it difficult for a single place to become the definitive and sole repository. For instance, although some of Friedman's most significant posters are held in the collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the vast majority of his myriad posters—many of which were small commissions for local businesses and cultural organizations—are not priorities for art museums. The bulk of Friedman's photographic output, comprising thousands of prints and negatives, went to the Photographic Archives in the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville, Friedman's alma mater. Yet stewarding three-dimensional art works can strain the capacity of even a premier photographic archive in a robust university special collections environment. The Filson Historical Society's mission to collect, preserve, and tell the significant stories of Kentucky and Ohio Valley history and culture, as well as its ability to collect across modes and media, including museum objects, made it a hospitable home for a diverse multimedia collection.

Julius Friedman's work also presented the Filson with an opportunity to grow and expand its collections, branching out further into contemporary visual arts by local artists. The Filson already possessed isolated posters by Friedman, most of which had arrived as part of other individual and institutional collections.¹ The core of the Filson's Julius Friedman Collection came in the spring of 2018, as a gift from Carol Abrams, Friedman's sister and the longtime manager of the artist's business and, later, his estate. Friedman's close friend Charles Bartman, a Louisville antiquarian book dealer and appraiser, had introduced Abrams to the Filson...