NEW YORK, NY.- Ryan Lee announced its representation of the estate of Camille Billops. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1933, Billops established her career in New York City. Initially encouraged to come to New York by her good friend Vivian Browne, she came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil rights movement and New York’s emerging black artists movement. She became an active member of the Soho artist scene in the late 1960s until her death in 2019, and the Soho loft that she shared with her husband, the theatre historian James V. Hatch, became a gathering place for prominent artists and intellectuals, many of whom were themselves civil rights and feminist activists. These include, among many others, artists David Hammon, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Emma Amos, and Clifford R. Joseph; playwright George C. Wolfe, and novelist John A. Williams.
Billops is best known for her ceramics, prints, and films that analyze and address racial tensions within society as well as her personal family history. A staunchly activist artist, Billops tackles her at-times thorny subjects with trademark wit and irony. Much of her stylistic influences derive from so-called “primitive” folk art as well as her extensive travels and years living in the Asian and African continents. Billops’s work frequently vacillates between the delicate and the grotesque—purposely utilizing disconcerting, satiric imagery to denounce and highlight internalized abuse of minorities and women.
The remarkable community for which Billop so ardently advocated proved to have an important influence on her life and career. Though Billops began her career in California as a ceramicist, she learned printmaking in 1973 under the tutelage of master printer Bob Blackburn. The ceramics, prints, and films that Billops produced throughout her life would frequently engage with themes of social commentary and level a critical look at Billops’s own personal and familial psychology. In 1975, she and Hatch founded the Hatch Billops archives, which aimed to record and preserve the enormous activity in the black New York scene during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1981, the couple began co-publishing Artists and Influence, an annual publication devoted to recording the stories of active minority artists, writers and intellectuals. In her art, activism and stewardship, Billops soon became a pillar of New York’s black artistic community, and was involved in many landmark organizations and exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition of Just Above Midtown Gallery in 1974 as a member of the gallery’s starting roster of artists.
Throughout her active life in New York, Billops frequently travelled around the world, and this exposure to various cultures and artistic traditions had a strong influence on her own creative output. With her husband, Billops lived and taught in Egypt where she exhibited at Galerie Akhenaton in 1965. She subsequently travelled, put on plays, wrote, and made art in Ghana, Malaysia, India and Japan, among other locations. In 1978 she traveled to Alisah, Morocco to help Blackburn set up his Morrocan printmaking workshop. In the early 1980s, Billops and Hatch lived in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where they both taught at local colleges. In response to this experience, Billops produced her longstanding Kaohsiung series—a subject and motif that would occupy her for years.
Billops died in 2019 in New York City. Her work is set to be exhibited this summer in Friends and Agitators: Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Vivian Browne and May Stevens, 1965 - 1993, a group exhibition at RYAN LEE. It has previously been exhibited in notable institutions around the world including: the Emory University Libraries, Atlanta, Georgia; Chau Yea Gallery, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; American Cultural Center, Taipei, Taiwan; American Center, Karachi, Pakistan; The Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, New York; Buchhandlung Welt, Hamburg, Germany; Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Foto-Falle Gallery, Hamburg, Germany; Winston Salem North Carolina State University, North Carolina; SOHO 20 Gallery, New York; Galerie Akhenaton, Cairo, Egypt; Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans at the University of Maryland; Brooklyn Museum, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Just Above Midtown, New York; El Museo de Arte Moderno, La Tertulia, Cali, Columbia; New Museum, New York; Jamaica Art Center, Jamaica, Queens, New York; Kenkeleba Gallery, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Her work is included in the permanent collection of a number of institutions such as the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff, Arkansas; The Burgess Group Fine Arts Collection, New York, New York; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; Jersey City Museum, New Jersey; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Drawers, Bern, Switzerland; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Petrucci Family Collection, Union Township, New Jersey; Photographers Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Schubladenmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York.
