Camille Billops

An intrepid explorer of multiple artistic mediums over the course of her lengthy career, Camille Billops (1933-2019) was a sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker. Expansive and fearless in her pursuits, she was also an actor, activist, collector, and an “archivist extraordinaire.”1 Born in Los Angeles, Billops studied occupational therapy, sculpture, and drawing at the University of Southern California and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in childhood education from Los Angeles State College (now California State University at Los Angeles) in 1960. She began working in clay while at USC, and then studied ceramics and sculpture while working at a bank and teaching children with disabilities following her graduation from L.A. State.2 Increasingly focused on building a career in the visual arts, she moved to New York and became enmeshed in the city’s Black arts community. She and her husband James V. Hatch, a white playwright and historian of Black theater, hosted gatherings of Black artists, musicians, and performers in their artist’s loft in lower Manhattan, a space that would become integral to New York’s Black arts scene. She was also involved in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and in protesting the exclusion of Black artists from exhibitions at New York’s major museums with groups such as the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. Billops received her M.F.A. degree from the City College of New York in 1975. She counted the master printmaker Robert Blackburn among her friends and colleagues; in 1978, she assisted Blackburn in establishing the first printmaking workshop in Asilah, Morocco.3

While much of Billops’s art addresses racism and gender inequities, it is also often deeply personal. The Story of Mom (1981), a four-foot-tall ceramic vessel that reads as a highly patterned and richly detailed two-dimensional surface image expanded to a three-dimensional vessel form, honors the artist’s godmother, who passed away when Billops was twelve years old and whose influence she felt throughout her life, and also alludes to her mother’s experiences caring for the families for whom she worked as a domestic laborer.4 With her hands on her hips, the stylized figure looks resolutely forward, avoiding eye contact and direct interaction with the anguished child who clings to the larger figure’s leg.5 Shiny cobalt-blue glazes accent the mother’s hair and blue eyes; variously colored abstract shapes, along with a black dog, rendered in profile like the maternal figure, surround the light-skinned child. In her prints, paintings, and sculpture, Billops frequently merged figuration and abstraction, adorning her figures with intricate patterns. Here, the mother’s body is covered in alternating black and tan stripes that emphasize her bodily form and nod to the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s that proliferated with patterns appropriated from ceramics, textiles, and built forms from around the world.

Artists who embraced Pattern and Decoration, many of whom were women, also rejected the valuing of European artistic traditions over those of much of the rest of the world that are often regarded as lesser “crafts” and refuted the gendered marginalization of these forms of artistic expression. Black women artists such as Emma Amos (1938-2020), Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), and Howardena Pindell (1938-2020), along with Billops, also found cultural and personal resonance in the patterned embellishments that are integral to a variety of African art forms. Interrogating expectations for women as mothers and subverting narratives of maternal fulfillment, The Story of Mom also resists the categorization of works in clay as either sculpture (art) or utilitarian vessels (craft) and the persistent association of ceramics with women’s domestic and maternal role.

Committed to the documentation and preservation of Black cultural history, Billops and her husband amassed a vast archive of books, exhibition catalogues, artists’ slides, photographs, oral histories, and other documents that became the Hatch-Billops Collection.6 With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, they recorded more than 1200 oral history interviews with visual, performing, and literary artists and filmmakers of color. Transcripts of many of these interviews were printed in Artist and Influence, the journal they published annually from 1981 until 1999. Now housed at Emory University, the Hatch-Billops Collection serves as an unparalleled resource for the study and preservation of Black cultural production.

Melanie Anne Herzog