Camille J. Billops (1933)
The KKK Boutique.
About:
Camille J. Billops, artist, filmmaker, archivist, and professor, was born on August 12, 1933, in Los Angeles. Her parents were Alma Gilmore and Lucius Billops, and she has one sister, Billie. She married James V. Hatch, a professor of theater at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in October 1963. They have one daughter, Christa Victoria Billops Hatch Richards.
In 1954 Billops entered University of Southern California to study art and occupational therapy. She transferred to California State University, Los Angeles, and graduated from that institution in 1960. She then briefly studied sculpture with a Huntington Hartford Foundation Fellowship. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Billops earned a master’s of fine arts degree from City College of New York and then studied for her Ph.D. at the D’Université of Paris-Sorbonne, France.
Japanese with Mirrors, 1975.
By 1965 Billops had established an international reputation as a sculptor, printmaker, and photographer. Her work has been exhibited in Egypt, West Germany, Pakistan, Taiwan, and the United States. Although her first exhibition was at the African Art Exhibition in Los Angeles in 1960, her other exhibitions have included the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center Los Angeles in 1963; the Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo, Egypt (1965); the Atlanta (Georgia) College of Art Gallery in 1989; and Washington Project for the Arts that same year. In 1978 she was artist-in-residence at the Asilah First World Festival in Casablanca, Morocco, and her series of ceramic sculptures, “Remembering Vienna,” appeared in 1986 in a number of venues.
Billops has taught for the art departments of Rutgers University and the City University of New York. The United States Information Services sponsored her teaching of art classes in India.
Working with photographer James Van Der Zee and poet Owen Dodson, Billops created The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), which includes a foreword by Toni Morrison. Billops has served as editor of an art journal, The Afro-American, in 1976 and as art editor of Indiana State University’s Black American Literature Forum.
Franco and Tessa, 1989-1991.
Billops is best known as a filmmaker. She has directed several films, producing all with her husband through their company, Mom and Pops Productions. Their best known films include Suzanne, Suzanne (1982), which chronicled the life of a survivor of domestic abuse; Older Women and Love (1987), which explored intergenerational relations; Finding Christa (1991), which documents Billops’s reunion with her daughter and explored intergenerational relations; and A String of Pearls (2002), which examined the struggles of men in her family traversing four generations. Finding Christa received the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
In 1975 Billops and her husband founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc., a non-profit research library of African American historical documents focusing on the arts. The library includes oral histories, slides, photography, and art that Billops and Hatch have collected over two decades in their SoHo, Manhattan loft. They have also published their interviews with African American artists, writers, and musicians in a journal, Artist and Influence.
Untitled.
Sources:
Maria K. Mootry, “Camille Billops,” Notable Black American Women, Book I (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992); “Bomb the Roots: The Camille Billops Interview,” by Ameena Meer, Bomb Magazine 40 (Summer 1992), http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2009/12/bomb_the_root_the_camille_billops_interview.html; Jennifer Warren, “Camille Billops: Lost and Found” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1992). http://articles.latimes.com/1992-06-28/news/tv-2150_1_camille-billops; Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Camille Billops,” Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997); An Interview of Camille Billops and James Hatch by Brian Lehrer, October 29, 2009), The Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC Radio. http://www.wnyc.org/story/31746-peoples-hall-of-fame-james-hatch-and-camille-billops/; James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson and Camille Billops, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan and Morgan, 1978).
Contributor:
• Scott-Zerr, Amy Marie
Independent Historian
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