“There are 623 precincts in Jefferson County,” Mayor Craig Greenberg says. “I love to run. When I was campaigning for mayor, I ran through all 623 to get to know every corner of our city.” We’re talking over coffee and guava pastries at Sweet Colada, a new Cuban café in Shelby Park. Greenberg has wanted to be mayor since eighth grade. “I know it sounds dorky, but that’s me.” Before making good on that dream, he helped run 21c, a culture-changing downtown hotel known for its contemporary art collection. In many ways he feels he’s still in the hospitality business.
“There’s something in the DNA of Louisvillians that’s all about hospitality,” he says. That extends to welcoming outsiders. “The city has been a strong magnet for immigrants over the past couple of decades, and that has had a wonderful impact on our communities.”
I don’t make it to every precinct, but I pack a lot into my days. After coffee with the mayor, I drive west, past downtown, to the Portland neighborhood, to meet the artist Stan Squirewell. His current project takes as its starting point old photos, mostly of Black Louisvillians from the early 20th century. Onto these found images, collected from archives and friends’ family albums, he layers on a collage of color, texture, fabric. Squirewell doesn’t know the stories of the people in the photos, so he honors them with new ones.
“I rework them because they speak to me,” says Squirewell, whose work has been collected by the Studio Museum in Harlem. “Look at this couple here.” He gestures to a black-and-white portrait enlarged to nearly life-size. “The way she leans on him, the comfort he has holding her up. What I’m asking the viewer is this: Remember; don’t forget these people.”
I was introduced to Squirewell by Gill Holland, the prominent real estate developer and philanthropist credited with breathing life into NuLu. Holland and then wife Augusta Brown ended up buying 16 buildings and advocating for the walkable entertainment district the area eventually became. Next he turned his attention to Portland and its neglected industrial and residential blocks. Squirewell’s studio is in one of Holland’s buildings, the old Dolfinger School, formerly a Civil War hospital. “Now it’s filled with artists and nonprofits,” Holland says.
