Camille Billops(1933-2019)

Camille Billops started as a sculptor and painter, became a filmmaker, and amassed a treasure trove of books, documents, and photographs related to black culture.She was born in Los Angeles in 1933 and studied art at the University of Southern California there and later switched to childhood education, the field in which she got her degree in 1960, at California State University.Her putting up her daughter Christa for adoption two years later, because she did not want to be a mother, became a source of controversy, especially when Billops later made a documentary about their reunion.In this period and into the 197os, with a white scholar of black theater in New York City named James V. Hatch who would become her husband, she presided over a 4,000 square feet artistic loft in the Soho neighborhood of that city which served as a hub for collaborations, a salon for musicians and other performers.A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed her and Hatch to record over 1,200 oral histories about black artists.These interviews and the other material she and her husband collected are now houses at Emory University.Billops died in Manhattan on June 1st of 2019.