Written by Sophie Auerbach
This is a time characterized by intense division, but also remarkable connection. I moved to Saint Paul in the Fall of 2020 to attend Macalester College. As my second year at Macalester College kicks off, so has my year-long internship at East Side Freedom Library. At a moment in our lives when connection and solidarity between cultures are as important as ever, I’ve been delving into the vivid life of an African American artist, archivist, and activist who spent her career working to preserve the voices of Black artists and their art.
Camille Billops was born in Los Angeles in 1933. She began her art career working with ceramics and later evolved to other mediums such as printmaking, sculpture, and film. Black stories and culture play a central role in Camille’s art, and her determination to collect the history and voices of Black artists throughout her career inspired the East Side Freedom Library (ESFL) to create a space to foreground historically marginalized voices. Art holds a notable place in the vision and work of ESFL.
ESFL Co-Executive directors, Peter Rachleff and Beth Cleary, met Camille in 1997 while trying to secure the rights for a play Beth wished to produce with her students at Macalester. This initial meeting evolved into a friendship spanning years and distance and leaving a lasting imprint on the development of the library. When I came to ESFL at the start of September, I learned about this brilliant history and was immediately drawn to the story of an artist who fought to memorialize Black art.
Camille’s art career took off in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s after Camille met James V. Hatch, the man who would become her husband and muse. Camille and Jim spent time abroad when Jim was offered a teaching position at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt through a Fulbright Fellowship. Her first art exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo displayed a small collection of ceramic pieces. After spending some years abroad cultivating her art, Camille returned with Jim to the U.S., where Black art wasn’t so readily received.
The move back to the U.S. precipitated Camille’s activism calling for the inclusion of Black art and, particularly, the work of Black women artists in mainstream galleries and museums. “We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn’t let us in,” Camille commented. “So we said, ‘Well fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’” In 1968 Camille took part in the protest of the Whitney American Museum of Art exclusion of Black artists from an exhibit. She was also involved in the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition – a group of Black artists formed in response to the MET’s controversial “Harlem on the Mind” exhibit in 1968. The Coalition protested on the grounds that the MET needed to include a greater diversity of artists and art forms. The “Harlem on the Mind” exhibit was assembled in response to the Civil Rights Movement, yet it excluded many Black artists. The gallery consisted primarily of pictures and news clipping, seemingly more in favor of displaying a social narrative rather than art.
The sweeping calls for the inclusion of black art had an impact. In 1986, Camille’s work was featured in an exhibition, hosted by the NC Central University Art Museum and Delta Arts Center, titled “Forever Free: Art by African American Women, 1862-1980.” The exhibit showcased art by 56 Black women artists. Camille’s artwork was also displayed in the New York Brooklyn Museum’s touring exhibition in 2017 called “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85.”
In the early 1980s, Camille shifted from sculpture and printmaking to filmmaking, which is perhaps her most well-known work. Alongside her husband, Camille directed six films which were produced by their film company, Mom and Pop Productions. In a series of three films, Camille chronicled her family’s history. This “celebration of the family” began with their first film, Suzanne, Suzanne (1982). This film focuses on the story of Camille’s niece, Suzanne, and her struggle overcoming heroin addiction and grappling with her father’s abuse. Camille’s family’s trilogy was produced over a period of thirty years, starting with Suzanne, Suzanne (1982), then Finding Christa (1991), and ending with A String of Pearls (2002).
Sitting under a backdrop of art and surrounded by books, I watched three of Camille’s films at ESFL. I first watched Finding Christa, a film exploring Camille’s reunion with her daughter, Christa, whom she gave up for adoption in 1961 when she was 4-years-old. In an interview conducted in the summer of 1992 by Ameena Meer, Camille elaborated that “Finding Christa is a plea for women to think about their choices.” Earlier she stated, “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.” Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at Sundance Film Festival in 1992.
Another film Camille wrote and directed is called The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994). This film investigates racism in all its shapes and forms. Camille and Jim released a statement with the film saying “We Americans have tried to ignore it, deny it, suppress it, to contain it, tolerate it, legislate it, mock it, exploit it.” In another interview, Camille elaborated 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…I talked about my racism.” The KKK Boutique takes the audience on a tour through the landscape of racism, reminiscent of Dante and Virgil’s journey through hell.
In 1972, Camille and Jim founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, which is now located at Emory University. Twenty years later in an interview, Camille stated, “We started the Hatch-Billops collection, a library on Black Americans in the Arts because we thought, Nobody else is going to do it.” The collection was previously housed in Camille and Jim’s 4,000 sq ft SoHo loft in Manhattan. In addition to housing a massive archive of Black-American cultural history, the loft also functioned as Camille and Jim’s home and art studio. Books, newspapers, posters, pamphlets, plays and art were included in the collection along with nearly 1,500 oral history interviews with artists and cultural figures. These interviews were conducted live in front of an audience in the loft, broadcast on public access cable television, and later published in the Hatch-Billops Collection’s annual journal Artist and Influence. The journal premiered in 1981 and ran for 30 years, assembled thousands of oral interviews and essays by Black artists. The East Side Freedom Library (ESFL) has a nearly complete run of Artist and Influence on their shelves.
Also housed at ESFL is The Harlem Book of the Dead. Published in 1978, this book is the product of a collaboration between Camille, James Van Der Zee, and Owen Dodson. James Van Der Zee was a black photographer who began his work during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and grew to prominence after his work was featured in the controversial exhibit “Harlem on my Mind.” The book arranges Van Der Zee’s photographs of the dead alongside poetry written by Dodson, a Black poet, playwright, and novelist. “Two ancient views, two truths, two ways of loving mankind,” Camille articulates in the book’s introduction. The book talks about burial rituals and mourning practices in Harlem.
Camille’s films dive into stories and topics that people shy away from. Her activism fights for the inclusion of artists that have historically been cast aside by prevailing art institutions. The East Side Freedom Library continues Camille’s determination for inclusion, justice, and solidarity. My engagement at ESFL with Camille’s work, her films and nearly thirty years of Artist and Influence in addition to The Harlem Book of the Dead, has prompted me to think about my own stories. Much of Camille’s work was unsettling to me, but it has taught me the value of being uncomfortable; to go deeper and be more critical with my questions and reflections as a White woman in college. The East Side Freedom library is a place where I can learn from those before me and follow where my curiosity takes me.
Sophie Auerbach is an intern at East Side Freedom Library from Macalester College. At Macalester, she is studying History and International Studies and she is passionate about books and art.