Camille Billops

491 Broadway

Camille Billops’ loft in SoHo was a place of artistic experimentation, intellectual exchange, and legacy preservation for her creative community.

A multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Billops began her art practice as a ceramicist at the University of Southern California in the late 1950s. and later moved to New York City in the 1960s to further her artistic career.

As a young woman in the 1960s, Billops moved to New York City to further her artistic career. There, she found herself involved with many Downtown-based art activist groups. Invited by its leader, Benny Andrews, she became a co-director of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) during its advocacy for more recognition for Black people in the arts. Her participation in this group allowed her many exhibition opportunities and led her to purchasing property in SoHo, where many of her contemporaries began to live, work and congregate in the 1970s.

A major juncture of Billops’ career came when she trained in printmaking at Robert Blackburn's studio on 55 W 17th St. There, she met many successful artists who would help further her creative vision, including Krishna Reddy, Mohammed Omar Khalil, Vincent Smith, Romare Bearden, and others. Many of her prints reference cultural stereotypes, such as the featured work from her “Minstrel Series,” a series of lithographs that examines the absurdity of the harmful racial stereotypes assigned to Black Americans during slavery.

In 1975, Billops and her husband, theater scholar James V. Hatch, launched the Hatch-Billops Collection: an informational resource to promote and preserve the careers of artists of color. Their SoHo loft became an important archival database and community meeting place. There, the couple staged performances, held talks and salons, created film sets, and conducted interviews for their oral history journal, Artist & Influence.

By the 1980s, Billops and her husband began collaborating on impressionistic documentary films, which fused interviews, documentary and found footage, and fantastical staged scenes to tell stories from Billops’ life.

Camille Billops' decision to live and work in Downtown NYC was pivotal, leading her to engage with the area’s artistic scene, intersectional feminist practice, and newly-formed activist groups, all whilst building an important archival collection to preserve these legacies. Her loft, located in SoHo, contributed to the neighborhood’s legacy as a creative haven and provided gathering space for other artists. Throughout the scope of her work, Billops harnessed the power of her creative community to make meaningful contributions to printmaking, filmmaking, and cultural preservation.

“All of my work is about the celebration of family, my private stories, and personal vision. When I do figures, I refer back to the forms I saw as a child: the décolletés and sleeves of my mother's dresses, the fabrics, my father's suit lapels.”