Protean artist Camille Billops (1933–2019) is perhaps best known for Finding Christa (1991), a film she codirected with her husband, historian James V. Hatch, about her decision to give up her four-year-old daughter for adoption in 1961. The fifty-five-minute picture won the 1992 Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and its success was accompanied by the public’s unforgiving and racist pigeonholing of Billops as a “bad mother.” Fortunately, that never stopped her.
Billops was well aware of cultural erasure and was a lifelong mainstay of the Black artist community in New York. She was a codirector of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in the 1970s, as well as one of the leading lights of the historic Just Above Midtown gallery in Manhattan. (Her figurative ceramic sculptures Madame Puisay, 1981, and the dazzling Untitled (lamp), 1975, were featured in the 2022–23 exhibition about 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 Influence, which was published annually between 1981 and 2011. “I always tell people that if you are not on a piece of paper, then you don’t exist,” she once said to bell hooks. The couple also created the Hatch-Billops Collection, an archive of African American cultural history. All the while, Billops pursued printmaking, sculpture, jewelry, book illustration, and more.
In her 2000 “Mondo Negro” series, comprising five lithographs—images that made their debut in “Mirror, Mirror,” an exhibition of Billops’s work at Ryan Lee, which focused on her late-career output—the artist integrated some of her signature motifs, such as snakes, suns, and burning and falling figures, in an abstracted pre-9/11 Black world. Also on view was a selection of mirrors with chunky and colorful frames that she crafted piecemeal from painted and glazed ceramics, made approximately between 2003 and 2011. These particular works nod to her beginnings as a ceramicist while studying at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. The talismanic pieces allow one to ruminate on the artist’s long career, as they, too, incorporate emblems from her personal symbology, such as cartoonish figures rendered with bold geometric angles. In this show, five of her mirrors were installed along a long wall, including two responses to 9/11: Who Did It?, 2003, and White Woman with US Flags, 2011. Both feature jingoistic “good ol’ gals” with ersatz corn-blonde hair and examine the depravities of whiteness, violence, and war.
Rounding out the presentation were three lithographs from Billops’s “Kaohsiung Series,” 2012. She based these works on her memories of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where Hatch taught on a Fulbright Fellowship during the early 1980s. Throughout that decade, Billops’s art became more autobiographical and radically feminist. The two figures pictured in a hand mirror throughout these pieces are Billops and Hatch, and the bright pyramids behind them indicate the time they lived in Egypt during the early to mid-1960s. After she gave her child up for adoption, the pair journeyed extensively, visiting India, Africa, and Japan. The traditional Mandarin lettering on the upper-right-hand side of each image, 銂々泫齌涳 translates to “a sweet and beloved couple represented in the mirror.” It’s transparent here, once again, that Billops was looking back while cannily, and unapologetically, moving forward.
