Kentucky Center for African American Heritage | Cultural Heritage Video Production

Filming at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage was a real honor, and one of those projects that taught me as much as it asked of me. Going in, I didn't know the depth of the history sitting in this building — a 68,000-square-foot Louisville facility that began life as a trolley barn and was, as the staff told us, an epicenter of civil rights protest going back to the 1800s. We were there to capture the Center's mission of preserving and promoting Kentucky African American heritage, and the longer we filmed, the more we understood why that mission matters.

The Center carries out its work in three ways — education, enrichment, and performance — and we wanted the video to move through all three. We filmed the lecture-and-workshop side, the exhibits in the Great Hall and the Rotunda of the Ancestors, and the on-campus Samuel Plato Industrial and Creative Arts Institute, where rooms dedicated to jewelry-making, open studio, painting, weaving, printing, and woodworking show heritage as something people make, not just something they read about. And if you watch closely, you'll meet my whole family — we brought several generations in as background actors, so a project about heritage and the histories we pass to our children ended up holding a little of my own.

Production Challenge

A heritage institution is a hard thing to film well, because the story lives in two places at once: in the artifacts and exhibits on the walls, and in the people who carry the mission forward. We needed the cinematography to honor the space — the architecture, the Rotunda, the art being made on campus — while keeping the interviews intimate enough that the viewer feels the conviction behind every word. We built the edit so the building and the voices reinforce each other, letting the exhibits ground the history and the staff bring it into the present.

About This Project
Client: Kentucky Center for African American Heritage
Type: Documentary, Nonprofit & Cultural Institution Profile
Location: Louisville, KY
Services: Documentary video production, on-location interviews, cinematography and b-roll, editing

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Video Transcript:

The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage is located in Louisville, Kentucky. We have a 68,000 square foot facility where we are focused on preserving and promoting Kentucky African American heritage and the heritage that we share with the African diaspora. The idea actually started back in the mid 1990s, where a group of concerned educators and artists and cultural workers really wanted to make sure that the public knew more about the contributions of Kentucky African Americans. It just so happened that this site was a former trolley barn and was also kind of the epicenter of civil rights protests in the 1800s.

The Heritage Center fulfills its mission in three ways, and that's through education, enrichment, and performance. The education, we do that in many ways. We have lecture series, we have workshops, seminars. Sometimes people come with ideas and they want to do presentations, so we make provisions for that as well. But we also have what we call the Samuel Plato Industrial and Creative Arts Institute, which is located on our campus.

Art-making is a really important part of community and also really helping people have a safe place to be with one another and have healing in their life. One big room is dedicated to jewelry-making and another very large room for open studio. We have painting and weaving and printing and all kinds of different art mediums happening there. In the very back of that center is a lot of woodworking materials and machinery for the more industrial part of the creative arts. It's really important for people to be able to look all the way back, but also create work that will be seen by their children and by people here in the neighborhood in years to come.

One of the things that we really hope that the center does is provide knowledge about African American history and heritage to not only African Americans, but to the wider community. We have people come in that are not African American that are just so amazed at the history that they didn't know. And I think that this is an important piece that we have to really emphasize, is that in order for us to truly understand one another, you first have to understand each other's story. But if you don't have a platform to tell that story, others will never know. And so what we're hoping is that the center will provide that platform for people to learn about us.

People can have access to each other and learning about each other and their shared historical experiences, their shared family experiences. And so when I see children in particular, I see the opportunity for them to have a foundation that was very much lacking when I was a child.

So when you come into the center and you enter into the Great Hall, you have to go through the Rotunda of the Ancestors. This is where our story begins, and what you see are representations of some key figures within our history that it's important for people to know and understand. So when we tell the story, we're not only telling contemporary stories, we're also talking about stories from the ancient past. There's a tendency to really focus on our history starting from slavery, but there's a history that existed thousands of years prior to that.

The exhibits that we have here are exhibits that really give people a heritage experience. They come to learn about people, places, events that have occurred so that they could have a better understanding of the stories, an authentic understanding of the stories that have happened.

As a center of heritage, it's a public history institution in every sense of the term, because what the center does is it invites people from the community to bring in artifacts, photographs, letters, things that are commemorative of their family life, of their family history, of their genealogy. And this becomes part of the repository of this center.

When we talk about African American history, we're talking about American history, and that's important for our children to understand. If we're going to coexist together, we need to understand that we all have histories that have contributed to what we call the United States of America.