Staff Favorites: Camille Billops By Candice Lawrence | July 13, 2020

Camille J. Billops (American, 1939 - 2019) “El Pimpo’s Chair,” 1970. Raku clay, 31 × 21 × 18 inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; The Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection of African American Art

Camille Billops stepped into the art scene as a sculptor. She also took up ceramics, sketching and painting during the early years of her career. Her art often depicts African American history and culture. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions at Galerie Akhenaton in Cairo, Egypt, and El Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia, among other art shows around the world.

Billops’ love of art lead her to explore multiple mediums, including filmmaking. Most of her films center on events pertaining to her family such as the award-winning and largely autobiographical “Finding Christa” (1991) about reuniting with the daughter she once gave up, and “Suzanne, Suzanne” (1982), which delves into her niece’s heroin addiction and recovery. She made several films with James Hatch, her husband and Black theater historian, under their Mom and Pop Productions company.

Billops’ and Hatch’s collaborations didn’t stop with their films. The duo also expended their efforts in establishing a massive collection of African-American art and history. The Hatch-Billops Collection includes thousands of recordings, publications and images. In addition to this archive, the couple also annually published Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History for 18 years.

In 1978, Billops teamed up with photographer James Van Der Zee and to publish The Harlem Book of the Dead, a book about historic mourning and burial rituals in Harlem.

The Georgia Museum of Art is proud to include several of Billops’ works in the permanent collection. Check out our collections database to see more of Billops’ works of art. Camille Billops, Maker of Unflinching Documentary Films, Is Dead at 85 by Alex Greenberger | June 3, 2019

Camille Billops. © 1991 Ruth Williamson. Camille Billops, whose pioneering documentary films fearlessly and powerfully addressed difficult histories, has died, according to multiple postings online by friends and colleagues. She was 85.

A cause of death has not been confirmed, though a recent profile of Billops in Topic magazine said she suffered from dementia.

Billops is best known for documentary works like Finding Christa (1991), a 55-minute film that recounts why she gave up her four-year-old daughter and how they reconnected more than two decades later. (The film’s narrative is explored in-depth in the Topic article.) Like many of Billops’s works, Finding Christa was made in collaboration with her husband, James Hatch, with whom she ran the production company Mom and Pop Productions.

Over the course of Finding Christa, which makes use of restagings, archival footage, and interviews, Billops tells how, when she was 27, she left her daughter in a bathroom at the Children’s Home Society. “Why did you give me away?” Christa asks in voiceover at the film’s beginning. The reason, it turns out, was so that Billops could pursue an artistic career.

When it showed at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, Finding Christa received the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, making Billops the first black woman to win the award. In an essay that year in Artforum about black women directors, artist Lorraine O’Grady wrote that Finding Christa “expands the concept of the documentary into something for which I still can’t find a name.” critic Vincent Canby called it “terrifically artful.”

For Billops, film offered a valuable way to archive narratives that might otherwise be invisible. Speaking of her tendency to create biographical work, Billops once told the writer in an interview, “Put all your friends in it, everybody you loved, so one day they will find you and know that you were all here together.”

Some of her films dealt with broader histories of social inequity. The KKK Boutique: Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) focused on racism in the U.S. by way of friends and colleagues of Billops and Hatch recounting instances of prejudice as a rejoinder to the notion that anti-blackness could be forgotten. “We Americans have tried to ignore it, deny it, suppress it, to contain it, tolerate it, legislate it, mock it, exploit it,” Billops and Hatch wrote in a statement accompanying the work.

Part of Billops’s larger artistic project involved ensuring that the voices of black women were heard. She began working as an artist during the 1960s, at a time when a group of black female artists such as Faith Ringgold, Howardena Pindell, and Emma Amos began calling for the formation of spaces in which they and other members of their community could show their art. Mainstream galleries generally did not show black artists’ work, so they took it upon themselves to change. “We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn’t let us in,” Billops once said. “So we said, ‘Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’”

Their efforts were historicized in the touring exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85,” which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2017 and included Billops’s work. For many, the show marked one of the first major opportunities to see Billops’s art in an institutional setting. One of Billops’s most notable projects was not an artwork but a space. In the 1980s, she and Hatch rented a loft on East 11th Street in New York and began using it to show their friends’ art. The space also included Billops’s studio, Hatch’s office, and the couple’s extensive library of archival materials related to work by black artists. Their holdings—which wound up including more than 1,200 interviews with artists and more than 1,000 scripts by African-American playwrights, as well as related correspondence, photographs, books, and periodicals—are currently held at in Atlanta.

Billops also oversaw Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History, which focused mainly on work by African-Americans but also included interviews and articles about Asian and Latinx creators. One of the essential journals of its kind, it ran from 1981 to 1999.

Camille Billops was born in 1933 in Los Angeles. Her parents had come to as part of the Great Migration, and she often described their view that she would grow up to be a mother—which she actively fought against. By the time she turned 10, she decided she’d never have children. After earning an undergraduate degree from California State College, she became a teacher to physically handicapped children in L.A. She then went back to school at the University of Southern California and received a degree in art.

In 1962, while in Egypt, where Hatch was teaching through a Fulbright fellowship, Billops had her first solo exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo. She showed ceramic works and sculptures, and she would go on to work in a variety of mediums, including photographs, collages, prints, and more. Many of her non-filmic pieces take the form of abstractions with figures that appear to morph into one another; they allude, in their titles, to histories of racism and harmful stereotypes.

In many cases, Billops talked about her art as a way of exposing matters from her personal life that, for many, would not typically be discussed. In interviews, she described audience members telling her that films such as Finding Christa were brave, and that she was surprised by their reaction. “Often, we don’t say things we should,” she said. “I tried to say those things.” Camille Billops (1933–2019) June 6, 2019

Camille Billops with cat and one of her sculptures, 1971. Photo: Emory University.

Printmaker, sculptor, and documentary filmmaker Camille Billops, whose momentous films Suzanne Suzanne (1982) and Finding Christa (1991) took up some of society’s deepest-running taboos concerning motherhood and black trauma, died on Monday, June 1. She was eighty-five years old.

Finding Christa grapples with Billops’s decision to place her four-year-old daughter Christa for adoption and the lingering implications revealed by the adult Christa, who reached out to Billops and appears in the film. “Why did you leave me?” she asks. “It’s been so long since I felt complete.” Though the narrative eludes easy answers, at one point Billops says: “I was trying to give her something else, because I felt she needed a mother and a father. I’m sorry about the pain it caused Christa as a young child, but I’m not sorry about the act.”

Lorraine O’Grady wrote of the film in the January 1992 issue of Artforum: “It may be the most artistically interesting of the films I’ve seen. It expands the concept of the documentary into something for which I still can’t find a name [and] seems to define the revolutionary potential in what Richard Rorty calls ‘abnormal discourse,’ the new thing that can happen when one is either unaware of or sets aside the rules.” It won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Billops was born in 1933 to parents who had migrated to California to escape the violence of the Jim Crow South. She grew up in Los Angeles; studied at the University of Southern California and the City College in Los Angeles; and in 1965, moved to with her husband James B. Hatch, with whom she codirected and coproduced films including Finding Christa (Christa’s father abandoned Billops shortly before their marriage). Billops was active as an artist throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and belonged to collectives such as Women Artists in Revolution with May Stevens, Faith Ringgold, and Elizabeth Catlett, among others. Billops, who taught at Rutgers University and City University of New York, was included in 2017’s “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

“We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn’t let us in,” Billops said about the institutional art world at this time. “So we said, ‘Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’”

In 1968, she established the Hatch-Billops Collection, comprising over 6,000 books, 1,200 scripts, and more than 10,000 photographic records that document the lives and work of black American artists such as Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, Ed Bullins, and Zora Neale Hurston. Since 1981, she and Hatch had published Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History. The journal features transcripts, interviews, and panel discussions with artists, which often took place at their SoHo loft in New York.

“It is important that we write our own histories,” Billops told The Topic in an extensive profile this year. “Otherwise, they will say we were never here.” Artists Fahamu Pecou and Camille Billops on resistance, staying true By Rosalind Bentley | March 16, 2017

“Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch”

9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday- Saturday, through May 14, 2017. Free. Schatten Gallery, Woodruff Library at Emory University, 540 Asbury Circle, Atlanta., 404-727-3668, www.emory.edu.

By nature, artist Fahamu Pecou is quiet and soft spoken, except when he’s headlining one of his signature artist talks or performance art events. On stage he can be kinetic, funny, the ultimate hype man. So when he walked into a restaurant to talk with fellow artist and provocateur Camille Billops, at first it wasn’t clear which persona would manifest.

Within minutes it was clear the reflective Pecou had shown up, the Emory University doctoral student whose work is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Pecou’s career as a painter and filmmaker is ascendant. Last year he headlined a show at the High Museum. This summer his latest series of portraits, “Do or Die: Affect, Ritual, Resistance,” opened in a major exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, S.C. He just completed the rap single and short film, “Emmett Still,” with Atlanta rapper and activist Killer Mike, a project that’s a meditation on the lives of young black men in an age of violence from within and without.

And yet, Pecou was still nervous to meet the diminutive, gray-haired, 83-year-old Billops. And maybe he should have been. Billops, in long partnership with her husband and collaborator James V. Hatch, has been a celebrated painter, sculptor, filmmaker, educator and, above all, historian of 20th-century African-American art. She’s bold, smart, profane and still passionate about black artistic expression. Her and Hatch’s life’s work is the subject of “Still Raising Hell,” a major exhibition of their films, papers and artwork at Emory University’s Rose Library. For nearly 50 years, Billops and Hatch published interviews with some of the most prominent names in black art, as well as many who were obscure but who had, as Billops said, “something important to say.”

So Pecou and Billops sat down as two artists from different generations, each dealing with the eternal struggle of creating work that helps a group of people claim their space in the world.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you talk about your earliest influences that showed you the artist’s way, stretching as far back as you can remember, because this path doesn’t start when you’re a teenager but long before.

Pecou: The encyclopedia. In we were really poor, we didn’t have a lot of anything, but there was a set of encyclopedias from 1969, and I used to sit and read these encyclopedias all the time and dream about being in the encyclopedia one day.

Billops: How old were you?

Pecou: I was 7 or 8.

Billops: That’s a good age, because you’re a little sharper than 4.

(Laughter)

Pecou: At the same time, I really wanted to be an artist because I really loved drawing. People said you’ll be a starving artist. But in that encyclopedia, it said that a cartoon animator could make $1,000 a week. And I’m like, if they were making $1,000 a week in 1969, they have to be making a lot more now. Billops: My godbrother was the first black animator to work for Warner Brothers, Frank Braxton. We grew up together and all of our parents were maids and domestics. He was my early inspiration. He said, “Why don’t you draw from your imagination?” And I said, “Well, how do you do that?” And that’s what he did to push me off the edge.

Let’s talk about your work now. Both are rooted in resistance. Fahamu, your work is grounded in African-American male identity. Camille you’ve described your work as feminist.

Billops: That’s an intellectual thing that occurs later. The life that you lived, and how you manipulated that life, what you did with things, how you discovered sex. I’m talking about the pieces, the things that go to make art, of ideas of where you are in time and space.

Pecou: So, the idea of resistance isn’t just an intellectual thing, but it comes from actual living and experience.

Billops: Yes! Living. When I was 11, I was in a talent show and I wanted to sing “Wrap it Up and Put it Away Until Daddy Comes Home from the Army.” I wanted to sing that up on stage and they said, “Baby Camille, that’s not a song for you to sing.” I didn’t know what “it” was. So I’m on the stage, at the age of 11 trying to be sexy and I’m singing. I’m saying, all of these elements make the art. All of it. A piece of that, your visit here, your grandmother. So it’s not like art school. It’s the life thing. It’s what you discover.

Fahamu: That resonates. It’s about how you chose to live. This idea of resistance in my work is a reflection of this understanding of how the world operates, but choosing how you want to operate within it as opposed to letting the world dictate how you should move. Which we see a lot in hip-hop culture. You have this image that looks antithetical — “Why are the kids wearing their pants sagging?” Well, that sagging is a kind of resistance, because the world wants to erase you, for you to dress a certain way and carry yourself a certain way, and look a certain way so that they are comfortable with you. But their comfort should not dictate how you express yourself and live your life. So resistance in my work refers to that sense of, “I’m here and you have to take me for who I am.”

Billops: But that hair you’re wearing now (pointing to Fahamu’s angular Gumby afro) that’s a contemporary expression. When I was growing up they were “conkin’” it, putting grease in it. But this is an expression of your contemporary self.

Pecou: What I’m attempting to do in my work is to provide a crucial intervention in the ways in which black men see themselves. We’re constantly bombarded with images and ideas that suggest that black masculinity is prone to violence, prone to crime. I began to mark my own birthdays by the tragedies I avoided: 18, “Whew, never been shot”; 21, “I haven’t been arrested”; 25, “No children.” Thinking that was my reality, but when I got to be 28, 29, looking back I thought, “well that was all some bull.” None of that stuff happened and it didn’t have to happen. Part of the reason I’m invested in the type of work I do is to show young boys, “Yeah, you might hear all that stuff, but there are myriad ways for you to live, and many opportunities available to you. All you have to do is see that those things are possible.” My work is about representing what can be.

Billops: Rather than repeat.

Camille, you made a difficult choice in terms of children. When your daughter was 4 you decided—

Billops: I didn’t want to be a mother.

For some women to hear you say that will be jarring. (Billops put her daughter up for adoption when she was 4 years old).

Billops: You create family, you create friends, you create a new life. I stepped across … into my new life as I saw it. Then … wanting to create something that was very important, we started Hatch-Billops Collection.

Pecou: The relationships that I have with my children have given my work voice. When my daughter was born, I had practically given up being an artist. But it was like, “Because you’re here now, I have to do this. I don’t want to look back in 10 years and blame you for a career that I didn’t have.” And when my son was born that gave me the perspective to think about the way society influences our young black men.

Billops: I said I want to give Christa up for adoption because she has no mother or father. And we did a film about it. (Years later after her daughter found her.) Our relationship did not go into some happy result.

Camille comes out of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and Fahamu, you come from the tradition of hip-hop. How do they both influence you?

Pecou: I am a child of the Black Arts Movement. It’s the same thing (as hip-hop), they just gave it a different name.

Billops: Has your movement started to fade yet?

Pecou: It’s funny that you ask that because there’s this new group coming up, and I see people my age coming down really hard on these 17-, 18-, 19-years-olds about the music that they’re making. Like, “That’s not real hip-hop.” And I’m like, it couldn’t be more real. Maybe it’s not your aesthetic, but it’s no less hip-hop than the stuff that you made.

Billops: That’s right! It’s right there, all over you. A Printmaking Workshop in Morocco By Katherine Blood | July/August 2003 Artist-filmmaker Camille Billops took her audience on an enthralling journey during her slide and film lecture on May 27 in the Library’s Mumford Room.

The program was presented in conjunction with the Library of Congress-International Print Center New York exhibition, “Creative Space: Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop,” which was on display at the Library through June 28 and is now online at www.loc.gov/exhibits/blackburn/. The exhibition honored Blackburn’s remarkable contribution to creative life in America and beyond. Billops was a longtime friend and colleague of Blackburn, who died on April 21 at the age of 82.

Left, Camille Billops discussed part of her fascinating life and career in a May presentation at the Library; center, Billops and mentor and friend Robert Blackburn, 1995; right, “Rescue” by Billops (2000) was used to raise funds for the Hatch- Billops Collection, an extensive archives of Black American cultural history co-founded by Billops with her husband James Hatch. - Yusef El-Amin, Coreen Simpson and others

Drawing on her vast personal experience as a collector, visual artist and publisher, Billops began her talk with an appreciation of libraries as “ancestor altars” and a discussion about the value of collecting and documenting peoples’ work. She said: “One of the most revolutionary things you can do is to write a book about your work and about people who love you and define your work.” Also crucial, she said, is to recognize the value of one’s personal history and things as close to you as your own home, and to leave a clear plan for their long-term preservation. Billops has followed her own advice, making a series of acclaimed films about her life and family, including “Finding Christa,” for which she won the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992.

She is well-known in arts and scholarly communities as co-founder with her husband, James Hatch, of the Hatch-Billops Collection—an extensive archives of African American cultural history. Billops is also co-publisher with Hatch of the journal Artist and Influence, a vehicle since 1981 for interviews with a veritable “Who’s Who” of visual artists, as well as a forum for poets, writers, critics, theorists and other creators. A recent volume includes interviews with artist Allen Edmunds, founder and director of the renowned Brandywine Printmaking Workshop in Philadelphia, and Samella Lewis, a premier historian of African American art. While the journal is independently published by the Hatch-Billops Collection Inc., Billops acknowledges the long-term support of the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts.

Billops’ artworks have been exhibited throughout the world at venues such as the Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo, Egypt, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her artistry encompasses ceramic sculpture and printmaking, and examples of her prints from the Library’s collection were on display during the lecture.

The Asilah Printmaking Workshop

The centerpiece of Billops’ lecture was a slide show chronicling her experiences working with master printmaker Blackburn and other international artists in 1978 to establish the first printmaking workshop in Asilah, Morocco.

“I was in Morocco,” she began, “because of Bob Blackburn.” Blackburn changed the course of American art through his groundbreaking graphic work and his Printmaking Workshop, which he founded in New York City in 1948. Conceived as an open, democratic space where printmaking was the common language, Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop became a cultural crossroads, attracting artists from around the world and helping to seed similar workshops in the United States and Africa, including the printmaking workshop in Morocco. Left, Billops inscribed “Running Into a Wall Can Be Fatal” (1978) as follows: “Printed in Asilah, Morocco, 1st International Printmaking Workshop, I was invited by Bob Blackburn”; center, another print; right, Blackburn. The first Asilah Cultural Moussem (festival) in Morocco was launched in 1978, with an invitation to artists and performers from around the world from then-mayor Mohamed Benaissa, later the minister of culture, and now Morocco’s foreign minister.

Representing the Printmaking Workshop were Blackburn and fellow workshop artists Billops and Mohammed Khalil. The site of the new printmaking workshop was in the Raissouni Palace. Originally built in 1909 and once home to a famous pirate named Ahmed-al Raissouni, it was renamed the Palace of Culture around the time of the moussem. In founding the festival, Benaissa worked with painter Mohammed Melehi, who founded the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts.

In their joint essay for the book “Asilah: First Cultural Moussem July/August 1978” (Shoof Publications, 1979), Benaissa and Melehi wrote: “The first cultural ‘Moussem’ of Asilah was set up during the months of July and August 1978, around the existing remains of its historical sacred past. The ministry of culture restored a section of the city ramparts. We refurbished the large and luxurious ‘Raissouni Palace’ and transformed it into a ‘palace of culture.’ We installed art studios and equipped a hall, which was reserved for cultural gatherings. We created an open-air theatre in the old section of the city within the Portuguese walls. We also provided an area for film projections and organized a permanent exhibition of plastic arts.”

Visiting and local artists, including children, painted colorful murals on walls throughout the city, and this practice continues to be a hallmark feature of the annual festival.

Billops showed slides of the splendid palace architecture, sun-soaked courtyards and scenes of printmaking in the Asilah Workshop studio, often with master printmaker Khalil at the press. Billops pointed out the young crown prince, Prince Sidi Mohammed, now King of Morocco, among the onlookers in the workshop.

Above all, Billops’ slides were portraits—portraits of fellow artists and Moroccan friends, and equally, portraits of a particular time and place and atmosphere. Her photographs showed the artists at work and out exploring the town, in open air markets, at cafés, discotheques and musical performances. Included were many portraits of Blackburn himself, seen at a gathering where everyone had flowers tucked above their ears and in their hair, standing at a balcony during a quiet moment. Her slides from a second trip to Asilah in 1988 included a wonderful small series of Billops performing a joyful impromptu belly dance.

Taking tea in Asilah: Blackburn at far left and Billops at far right, 1978. - courtesy of the Hatch-Billops Collection, New York Billops recalled that the artists felt honored to be invited and to be part of something so special. She likened the energy in Asilah to other vital cultural centers, such as New York’s Harlem. As envisioned by Benaissa and Melehi, the festival attracted many tourists to Asilah and helped boost the local economy. In “Asilah: First Cultural Moussem” they further underscored the intent of the festival: “… on Arab soil, in Asilah, a fragment of the Third World, where men from North and South will find a permanent centre for cultural diffusion, rich in authenticity and steeped in heritage … where people will be able to define their distinctive features, their fundamental characteristics and their values.”

The inaugural group of international printmakers participating in the Asilah workshop included three women and nine men: Malika Agueznay (Morocco), Billops (United States), Nilde Carabba (Italy), Roman Artymowski (Poland), Rodolfo Abularach (Guatemala/United States), Blackburn (United States), Farid Belkahia (Morocco), Antonio Boça (Portugal), Salem Debbagh (Iraq), Khalil (Sudan/United States), Nacer Soumi (Palestine) and Shu Takahashi (Japan).

For 25 years, the moussem at Asilah has been an important creative destination for international artists, and Khalil continues to oversee the Asilah printmaking workshop during the annual festival.

Billops concluded her program with a short excerpt of a mid-1980s video interview with Blackburn by Kellie Jones, art historian and daughter of poet Amiri Baraka. The video was made for the Jamaica Arts Center exhibition “Masters and Pupils–The Education of Black Artists in New York 1900-1980,” which Jones curated.

Following the video, Billops spoke frankly and with affection about her long personal history with Blackburn and offered insights into his life and work. Camille Billops by Ameena Meer | July 1, 1992

Camille Billops. © 1991 Ruth Williamson.

The first time I saw Camille Billops, she stalked past me, feathers and beads clicking in her braids, black-rimmed eyes dancing below the brim of a man’s hat. She wore layers of Afro-Asian necklaces over an Indian kurta, a naughty grin under a perversely hairy upper lip (no depilatories here), ethnic brown sandals. “Is she Indian?” I whispered to a friend.

He laughed, “No, that’s Camille.” Camille Billops is a performer. At a cocktail party or walking down Broadway, she is an amalgamation of all the places she’s been—an African-American child growing up in a working-class family in California, a single mother and college student, the artist wife of a professor [her collaborator, James Hatch] in Egypt, a theater director in India, a teacher in Taiwan, a lecturer in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Thailand—and, with her explosive laughter, Camille is impossible to ignore. Her documentary, Finding Christa, about her decision to give up her daughter for adoption and the young woman’s search for her mother, is equally compelling and magical. Finding Christa won the Grand Prize for documentaries at the Sundance film festival this year.

Along with making films that are “a celebration of the family:” Suzanne Suzanne (1982) and Older Women and Love (1987); Camille Billops and James Hatch curate the Hatch- Billops collection, an extensive archive of 20 th Century Black Culture. Camille Billops is also a painter and sculptor and James Hatch is a professor of English at City College of New York. Finding Christa will be aired on PBS’ P.O.V.at 10:00 PM on June 29.

Ameena Meer How did you go from making art to making films?

Camille Billops In 1968, my husband [James Hatch] and I spent five months in India doing excerpts from a play called America Hurrah, a socially-conscious play of the times about the status of America. So Mr. and Mrs. Interracial Couple presented themselves in Calcutta, Bombay, and Bangalore. But Calcutta was the hippest: we used a partially- finished theater, and scenes were done in environments, in mazes, in little tunnelings. For all of us, it was a culture clash. I wanted to have actors walking through the legs of a Superblond. Well, in India, they don’t let you walk through the legs of any women. So we made Superblond a man. The play had sayings like, “And as usual, he said nothing. And as usual, I went away.” About being involved in meaningless situations that you never solve. When the U.S.I.S. people finally saw it, they freaked out that the American government had sponsored an anti-Johnson play with all those Bengali Communists. Oh, it was quite splendid and wonderful. Then, we went on a lecture tour through Thailand and Malaysia. We met a Chinese-Malaysian playwright, Lee Jou For, who “leaked” to the press that Jim was going to do his play on Broadway. Well, now, how was Jim going to get this Buddhist play on Broadway? But it made the Malaysian king and queen come to the performance; it made the United States government give him a travel grant. He really worked that one. So when we came back to New York, we did his play, Son of Zen. All the Buddhists we knew came to our loft on East 11th Street. We continued to do plays, one about the Panthers, one about the city; we did poetry readings, we had exhibitions. It was self-motivated activity and a lot of fun. And then we started the Hatch-Billops collection, a library on Black Americans in the Arts because we thought, “Nobody else is going to do it.” Film was just another art form, just different material. So, in 1978, we did a film about my niece who had been addicted to heroin.

AM Suzanne Suzanne.

CB I called it that because when she was telling me about her experiences, I kept saying, “Oh Suzanne! Suzanne!” Then we did Older Women and Love, a film about my aunt and her young lover. Finding Christa was our last film. Now we’re saying, “Well, why don’t we do this film about racism?” Because we always talk about racism and the inner dynamics of it. I came up with The KKK Boutique: Ain’t Just Rednecks.

AM Where did you study?

CB I went to art school at USC in 1954 after having gone to City College in Los Angeles. At USC, you had the most classical education possible for artists. Along with sculpture, drawing, ceramics, and weaving, I studied anatomy, neurology, physiology, orthopedics, kinesiology. In anatomy, we had six of us on one cadaver. We cut up bodies.

AM Like Leonardo.

CB It was a beautiful thing. Then I got pregnant, or as we say in Finding Christa, “knocked-up.” I had to change majors and go to another school. It threw me back three years, but I worked days, full-time at the bank and went to school at night and finished. But at one point, I decided I didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. I wanted to go back to the place that I considered the crossroads. And in this country, it’s possible to do that because the restrictions on women are slightly different and it’s a little more anonymous.

Camille Billops and James Hatch in Finding Christa. AM It would be impossible to lose your past in that way in a less transient society.

How did you choose such personal subjects? Your niece’s drug addiction, your aunt’s lover, the daughter you gave up for adoption: they’re so close to home that I’d find them impossible to approach as film.

CB Maybe it’s self-exhibitionism. A lot of people wouldn’t talk about those things. I learn from each audience. Most of the time, people say, “That was brave. We admire that. It was important to say that.” Often, we don’t say things we should. I tried to say those things. In view of a larger picture, that’s how the film should be considered. Not as a personal story, but as an example of the larger ideas about women. Women as nest-keepers, women as mothers, and how they are either honored or—women can be adventurers and explorers. Sometimes men want to be nest-keepers, but we don’t allow that. Finding Christa is a plea for women to think about their choices. You should never let anyone take those choices away from you. The control words for women are moral words. They will call you a whore if you want to stand out on the street, just to find out the news. You can’t hang out on that street. Men will circle and drive you away from the public space. So I was always curious about that. I am a feminist, but some of the white women, like the Kate Millets and that group who wanted to go to Iran to liberate the women behind the veil; I said, “Put your ass out on the streets, see how liberated you are. Check out that corner, you need a submachine gun.” But we don’t know the end of this yet, it’s been a very interesting exploration.

Sometimes, after seeing Finding Christa, women talk to me about children that they’re looking for, or that maybe they should have given up. But they don’t say it out in an open way, they tend to whisper it afterwards.

AM Watching Older Women and Love, sex and older women is such a taboo subject, I was transfixed and embarrassed at the same time.

CB Did you understand it? Because the jokes are Black. If you don’t get the jokes, it’s hard to get the film.

AM I did think it was funny.

CB There is some subtlety to it, like when Patty Bown talks about the young man who went to visit a woman in Harlem who had one tooth. It’s this sly talking, “I guess he settled in on that lady’s tooth.” Talking about oral sex, “I guess she toothed him to death, huh?” (laughter) I showed that film in Port Jefferson, to an audience of white women and they didn’t get it. So nothing happened.

AM Finding Christa, about giving your daughter up for adoption, took courage to make.

CB People see it as bravery, I think of it as a cleansing. A lot of men want to wrestle you to the ground, make you say you’re sorry: “Aren’t you happy you found her?” They’re saying, “Aren’t you going to make this up and repent? And be a real mother now that you have a chance?” An old friend of mine who never got married—he was saying, “You must do this for her, and you must do that.” And I said, “I don’t take that from childless men.” They want you to be a good girl. But many people are thinking people. And it does make people think.

AM You made your first film, Suzanne Suzanne for like …

CB $20,000 and Older Women was done for $34,000. Finding Christa was done for about $85,000.

AM That’s amazing.

CB We don’t pay anybody. We’re cheap. I have budgets for cameramen, but they don’t get all that money! I say, “Look, your income taxes don’t need this anyway. So why don’t you just take this two thousand dollars.”

AM How do you come up with the ideas?

CB Jim and I talk back and forth. We keep telling each other the story, until we come up with something. For the KKK: Boutique, we were going to have our friends come over and talk about their individual racism. But they’re all older and tight, closed and guarded. I was talking to kids at the Chicago Arts Institute, and maybe because certain sadnesses have not happened to them, they were much more open. I told them that we don’t have permission to talk about our racism because it’s such a shameful thing. You’re not supposed to have it. It’s too bad, we should treat it like TB. Suppose you were ashamed to have tuberculosis, like it used to be. I talked about my racism. I said, “Look at it this way. It’s a bad servant, it does not deliver what you want it to deliver. The person you hate does not go away, the situation does not go away by hating, and you are reactive and put your body in a very stressful situation, and if you do it over a period of time, you will come down with diseases. You blow all your energy.”

People come here with preconceived attitudes. They have those attitudes in their own country about color and class. I saw it all in Egypt: the light-skinned people walking in and the dark ones holding the door open. And in Taiwan, all the girls have gloves on and little white hats on, because they don’t want to get dark. One student was out in the surf, wading around out in the ocean, hiding under an umbrella. I said, “You’re not going to get dark, the sun’s down.” In this country, we always talk about the black and white of things. Black people accusing white people, and in between, we all just do each other as dirty as we can. Black America has a hard time with other minorities, because they see them as between them and the prize, which they feel is their due because of slavery. So, we want to talk about and address all the dynamics of this, but we also want to deal with the madness of things like … why do poor whites become Neo-Nazis? They are one of the most ignored groups in America. The upper-classes always call poor white people “trash.” So how do they get your attention? By acting out, becoming Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, the Aryan nation, the White People’s Party, Skinheads. And then their counterparts, who get to go to Harvard, just keep you out of the club and out of the neighborhood. And out of the power at the cocktail parties. Are they any different? AM Where do you think all the new South and Southeast Asian immigrants will fit?

CB Things happen in this country because you’re dark. Not necessarily because your hair’s nappy, but because you’re dark. That’s the first thing they see. So I’m curious about the group in between, where they go, what they do with it.

It will be hard to say, “I’m just a person.” No, you don’t get to be “just a person” here, you have to have a camp. And if it’s going to be with white people, you have to really be white. Nothing funny here. See, with Black America, there’s a legal definition. 1/32 Black blood, that means a great, great-grandmother Black—you are Black. That is only in this country, because of slavery. Not in any other place in the world. In Black America, there are color castes, based in slavery, that are perpetuated by white America and dearly nurtured by Black America. From what I’ve seen in other cultures of color, very similar systems are at work. It’s racism within the group and that’s very powerful. So white people are not the only players on the stage. If you don’t admit to your own racism, how do you expect to keep telling white people about theirs?

AM Within the Black community, is intermarriage looked upon badly? Even my Indian friends who’ve spent all their lives in England and America see themselves marrying other Indians, preferably from the same part of India. And then the intense pressure from parents and relatives and friends is enough to make an interracial relationship fall apart.

CB I always tell Black women who are looking for husbands—professionals, doctors and still they fall apart because they can’t get a Black man—I say, “You’re powerful, you got an eagle as a passport, and you’ve got a plastic, why don’t you make an ad? You want something black? Get a South Indian, they’re so black, they’re blue.” You can get Suzanne Browning and her family in Suzanne Suzanne. anything you want, make an ad, make an arranged marriage. I said, “Want a Philippino? They’re quite handsome, too. And the handsome Taiwanese people.” (laughter)

Everybody has a form of tribalism. My sister got the look from Black men because she had a Puerto Rican boyfriend. If she were on the street with two little nasty children needing a daddy, they wouldn’t pay attention. It’s male tribalism that sees women as property.

AM Who are you the most racist about?

CB You can check it out in The KKK Boutique.

AM Jim, tell me your side of the story. How did you start making films about Camille’s family?

James Hatch By accident. All three ideas are Camille’s. It’s her family and her ideas and we just supported that idea. And her family is very cooperative, confessional, I’ve known them for what, 30 years, so they’re not strangers. So I do scenario, and directing.

AM Did you write your scripts in advance?

JH We wrote the scripts out and never used them because we always let people tell their own story, their own way. But we have a direction, questions and areas. We set up what we’re looking for. We may get it, we may not. So we waste a lot of film.

AM With Finding Christa, did you both have a clear idea of what you were making together? Your ideas must be different.

JH Camille and I see generally the same thing but not exactly. Did she show you that review? It’s a nice review, but it says, “Camille reveals nothing about herself, she remains an enigma.” And in a way, it’s true. She talks a lot and gives you her opinion, but you really don’t know that much about her.

Christa Victoria in Finding Christa The Sorceress of Broome Street By James V. Hatch | Spring 1985

At the end of her loft on Broome Street, stands a tall, slimming mirror, which startles adult souls by reflecting their elegance. Some strut and pose; others sneak profile glances at themselves, their potbellies never so contained. These ordinary folk, held back by modesty, never kiss their images in the glass; but we children, and the childlike, rush forward, press our noses and lips against the cool surface, staring into our own eyes until our vision is misted over with our own breath; then and only then do we-like Alice and Orpheus-dissolve through the glass into the studio of Camille Billops.

For the token of a kiss to ourselves, we stand at the entrance which is guarded by three gods. First is Eshu, Lord of Uncertainty and Disorder. To him, we must make obeisance, for he is the god who causes one to stumble, to fall; he is the trickster who causes the delicate clay figure to slip from the fingers-a dangerous god in a ceramic studio. In the far corner, lives a family of fire gods; these ugly creatures leer from their red chambers-the kilns. It is they who decide which clay figures will live, and which will crack or explode. Finally, across the room above the work table sits Matsu on her golden throne. Fine threads of pearls conceal her face, for we must not look into her eyes. Once the protector of fishermen of South China, to Camille she is now the Afro- guardian of ancestors. To make obeisance to Matsu is-as we shall see-to acknowledge the continuity of the past, the line of spirit power from one generation to the next. To respect these gods is to open one’s self to the demons, gnomes, imps, great aunts and cousins, the godmothers who materialized themselves into Camille’s world; and, too, it is to learn their language, a personal meta-tongue of symbols and icons which resonates some- where in the heart, in the “hind brain” of us all.

Dominating one wall is the oldest of these creations: Black Suffering Jesus and Yellow Man, nearly life-sized, is spread-eagled on a wooden cross worn by fire and water. Passing through Jesus’ black and gold-gilt body is the profile of Yellow Man, his toe, a foot, and his face; he is as a ghost flying past on a separate mission; he is not Asian, but Yellow Man. On the shredded garments of the Christ is an unfamiliar script. Aramaic? No, it’s more akin to the secret codes we made up when we were seven; somewhere in us stirs a memory of climbing the garage roof to leap onto the apple tree, and the seriousness with which we spoke aloud to our silent partner. We point to a scrambling line of cryptography engraved into his loin cloth. “What does it say?” Camille smiles. “I learned that code from an artist, Lee Joo For in Kuala Lumpur; he was a Buddhist then, now a born-again Christian; I was once Catholic, but now I’m... I’m .... Well, I have created my own gods in an attempt to make them do my bidding. See there, that figure sitting with the black cloth over his face and the red heart on his spinal wall; that is The Black Suffering Jesus Shows Us His Bleeding Heart. And that woman sitting on the ceramic throne is The Mother, and over there The Bride and there The Sexist Baby Jesus in His Cradle. You see, when I was a little girl in Los Angeles, all the gods of the church were white and male; I was dark, female and had no power, so now I have created my own.” She runs her fingers over the script. “I write personal messages on all my work . . . for special people. This says, ‘Camille loves Jim.”’

If we ask why this secret message is carved upon the clay of a phantasmagorical Christ, the artist only smiles and points to a color lithograph nearby, The Dancers. Here, in a garden of delights, a black man and a white woman waltz; near the wall, a white man and a black woman embrace beneath a legend in Japanese. This time we are lucky; we have studied Japanese ... but what’s this? The characters are written backward. Then we see the title: “For Japanese with Mirrors.” A glass! A glass! Bring us a glass! Using the mirror, slowly we translate . . . “The blue-eyed black face and the slant-eyed kinky-haired dancing between gardens of racial purity, eating sushi and cornbread, and listening to funky koto music.” We look at one another and then back to the print. This time, an enigmatic smile creeps to our lips. Are we now part of the mystery?

When we come upon the bronze A Monument to Racial Purity, we are no longer surprised to find the legend in Japanese, nor the artist’s signature in Arabic, nor her Chinese “chop” upon the last series of drawings she brought home from Taiwan. To rest, we prop ourselves against a stool, reach casually for our cigarettes. Camille points to her sign-”Rauchen Verboten!” We pretend to not understand. She explains pointedly, as only an ex-smoker can, “It’s ok if you smoke, as long as you don’t exhale.”

We put our Camels back and gaze around the work space. On the wall, a French peace poster next to a Bugattis from Hamburg’s Kunsthalle. On the bulletin board, a 1940s James Wells print. Several hand-lettered signs in Chinese speak of her exhibitions. The blower fan, encrusted with glaze powders, lazes in the window. The cat scratches in its sandbox, and the begonia leaves turn toward the sun. Among the plants and trees that burgeon in the loft, resides a forest of ceramic creatures. In the silence, they invite us to confidences; they are not shy, but wait for us to linger, to give something of ourselves before they confide their secrets.

On a pedestal, a black man groomed in gorgeous orange and black stripes faces a woman in a stunning flowered dress. His gold tooth gleams in a direct, lusty grin; she looks askance, but does not discourage his advance. The two are an eternal pair never to be separated. Like the lovers on the Grecian Urn, “She can not fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.” The title, “Remember Vienna,” recalls an anecdote about Selma Burke in the 1940s, speeding through the boulevards of old Wien on her motorcycle. . . those were the days, my friends . . . the cafes, the evening on the ferris wheel... the Prater ... the love we never quite consummated ....

And who is this, beside the ficus tree? A bald-headed monkey brandishing a whip. His legend reads, “You bad thing!” We turn a tall cylindrical column a quarter-turn to find a clown-like face in white, clutching the hand of a small girl whose face shows all the mischief of a Zora Neale. What has this child done? On the next panel ... eight or nine columns of Chinese calligraphy, The Story of Billie, Camille’s sister. But in Chinese? How are we to learn the story? Now we search through the panels for clues, creating our own story. Satisfied but never satisfied, we turn the mystery round on its pedestal, around and around....

“Camille!” There is a petulance in our tone. “Why do you make your art so intimate, so esoteric? We don’t know your family stories.”

Her answer begins in her adolescent dream of becoming an “Artist,” when she was young, naive and enjoyed making things. Then into this dream flew the fairy godfather, a J. Paul Getty, or Rockefeller, or Hoving ... she can’t remember, but he stood before her drawing and nodded. Then he waved his wand. “TING!” The drawing turned into an objet d’ore. Museums, the wealthy, the famous, crowded around. Ting-ting-ting!

As late as ten or fifteen years ago, it seemed the dream could come true. Time magazine canonized a dozen black artists (had she noticed they were all men?); museums hosted huge black shows (had she noticed the chosen were picked for militancy?). Oh, those were heady days. Black and white critics tussled over aesthetic conundrums-”Is there a Black Art? A Black Aesthetic?” Opinions were many; answers, few. To distinguish black from “white” art, some wrote of the African continuum, a cultural tradition extending four hundred years back to ancestors. By social or genetic pattern, this black aesthetic had been passed down. Camille, like many artists of that time, made her “hadj” to Africa to find those roots and, like many, discovered her driver’s license and her Visa Card stamped “American.”

After Egypt, the Sudan, after Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Camille returned “home.” Now nearly forty, she still waited for the fairy godfather to bless her art. She turned to school, to teaching for a livelihood and waited, but no “ting” sounded from The New York Times. She found herself retiring into a Van Gogh-like fantasy in which she would be “tinged” after death. Like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral, she would look down from heaven to watch the busy mourners collecting her art. “Ting-ting-ting!”

Then an awareness crept into her consciousness: better to set about her own magic and, with her own wand, turn her clay into the gold of her own vision. She told her fellow artists,

“We must buy land, property, collect our own history, celebrate our own work.” For the next decade, like-minded people began to come together. Samella Lewis and Val Spaulding founded the quarterly journal Black Art (now The International Review of African American Art). Corrine Jennings and Joe Overstreet founded Kenkeleba House; Betty Blayton, The Children’s Art Carnival; Vivian Robinson, the AUDELCO organization; Lorraine Brown, the Federal Theatre History Project; Joe Weixlmann, the Black American Literature Forum. These and others saw that through mutual projects and mutual concern, the black cultural arts and its history could be sustained after the grants dried up, after the novelty and the fashion of race wore thin, after the black galleries closed, after mainstream America returned to business as usual.

Camille began collecting exhibition catalogs, photograph- ing the work of black artists. She co-founded the Hatch- Billops Collection, Inc., with its 10,000 slides and 1,000 oral histories. And as she collected, she saw more clearly that if her art were to be celebrated, she herself would have to be the priest; if her ancestors were to be glorified, it would have to be her ritual. “I sing the song of myself, and what I shall assume, you shall assume.”

In the serenity of her studio, we have forgotten the itch for a cigarette. We feel safe, secure somehow, to be surrounded by work, by industry. As the street sounds drift up from below, we take one more look around. There, a fat ceramic beast with a begonia growing from his back; there, a statuette of A’Lelia Walker, far more elegant even than the A’Lelia who lived; and there, a poem handwritten on gold paper: “Speak to me in those old words, you know the la-la words, the ah-ah words, the tung-tung kind of sounds.”

Yes, art does have its own tongue, and we do understand, each of us, the la-la words, the tung-tung sounds, for they are a secret hymn more glorious than a “ting-ting” from the other side of the mirror.

“Yes, let’s tip on off to the rock and see if the moon is still there. Go well, world, you mama and papa la la.”