Protean artist Camille Billops (1933-2019) is perhaps best known for Finding Christa (1991), a film she co-directed with her husband, historian James V. Hatch, about his decision to give up his four-year-old daughter for adoption in 1961. The fifty-five-minute pic won the Grand 1992 Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and its success was accompanied by the public’s ruthless and racist classification of Billops as a “bad mother”. Luckily, that never stopped her.
Billops was well aware of cultural erasure and was a lifelong pillar of the black artist community in New York. She was co-director of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in the 1970s, as well as one of the figureheads of the historic Just Above Midtown gallery in Manhattan. (His figurative ceramic sculptures Mrs Puisay1981, and the dazzling Untitled (lamp)1975, were featured in the 2022-2023 exhibition at Linda Goode Bryant’s legendary exhibition space at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Billops and Hatch recorded more than 1,200 oral histories, primarily those of black artists – including Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Henri Ghent, David Hammons, Norman Lewis, Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar – and published them in their journal, Artist and Influencer, which was published annually between 1981 and 2011. “I always tell people that if you’re not on a piece of paper, then you don’t exist,” she once told bell hooks . The couple also created the Hatch-Billops Collection, an archive of African-American cultural history. Throughout this time, Billops pursued printmaking, sculpture, jewelry, book illustration, etc.
In his 2000 “Mondo Negro” series, comprising five lithographs – images that debuted in “Mirror, Mirror”, an exhibition of Billops’ work at Ryan Lee, which focused on his late career production – l The artist has integrated some of his signature motifs, such as snakes, suns, and burning and falling figures, into an abstract black world from before 9/11. A selection of mirrors with thick and colored frames that she made piecemeal from painted and glazed ceramics, made between 2003 and 2011 approximately. These particular works refer to her beginnings as a ceramist while studying at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. The talismanic pieces allow us to ruminate on the artist’s long career, as they also incorporate emblems of his personal symbology, such as cartoonish figures rendered with bold geometric angles. In this show, five of his mirrors were installed along a long wall, including two responses to 9/11: That he has done?2003, and White woman with American flags2011. Both feature jingoist “good old girls” with ersatz blonde hair and examine the depravities of whiteness, violence and war.
The presentation was complemented by three lithographs from Billops’ “Kaohsiung Series”, 2012. She based these works on her memories of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where Hatch taught on a Fulbright scholarship in the early 1980s. Throughout this decade, Billops’ art became more autobiographical and radically feminist. The two figures depicted in a hand mirror throughout these pieces are Billops and Hatch, and the luminous pyramids behind them indicate when they lived in Egypt in the early to mid-1960s. After giving his child up for adoption , the couple traveled extensively, visiting India, Africa and Japan. The traditional Mandarin lettering at the top right of each image, 銂々泫齌涳 translates to “a sweet and beloved couple depicted in the mirror”. It’s transparent here, once again, that Billops was looking back while cunningly and shamelessly advancing.
