Camille Billops
Mirror, Mirror
February 16 – March 25, 2023
Opening reception: February 16, 2023, 6:00-8:00 pm

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Mirror, Mirror, a solo exhibition of works by the multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and activist Camille Billops. Featuring a series of ceramic mirrors, etchings, and drawings, this is the first significant solo presentation of Billops’s later work.

Infused with experiences of travels abroad, including globally informed artistic practices, Billops first began forging space for her art and activism in the 1960s in New York. A pioneering member of the emerging black artists movement, her work and activism were entwined, engaging with civil rights alongside exclusionary systems of the art industry at large.  Throughout her life, her artwork drew from these themes, from the ever-presence of racism to gender dynamics, black culture, and personal narrative and history.

 “All my work is about the celebration of family, my private stories and personal vision,” shared Billops in a 1985 interview published in ISSUE, A Journal for Artists. Referencing the Kaohsiung drawings – originally made in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, three of which are featured in this exhibition – she shares that the characters are in fact her and her husband, James V. Hatch, after a “magnificent fight.”

Billops was not only comfortable turning the intimate outward, she was strategic about it, using exposé as a tactic to confront the follies and failures of life, and resolutely unafraid to include her own. For a 2012 show, Billops had commented that her art is “about ‘victory over obscurity and ignorance, and confirmation of herself.’” In this sense, we are able to grasp a fuller picture of the artist, whose activism and committed preservation of black arts and culture is as large a part of her legacy and impact as her work is. Her output, holistically, is perseverance – at once personal and collective.

Billops’s sense of self-confirmation through self-portraiture, refrained in the Kaohsiung drawings, is inherent to the nature of her later mirror series. Begun in the early 2000s and completed in 2011, these metaphorically reflective works are likewise literal presentations of the viewer, placing us squarely within the contexts of the frame.

 In some, the mirrors’ ceramic-frame illustrations are figurative, as in Untitled (Checkered) (2003), where cartoonish characters engage in a mock-Americana tableau evoking a realm of behaviors from suspicious to blithe. In White Woman with US Flags (2011), the denotation may be more literal, but the style breaks molds with its looseness of form, as variously proportioned pieces of ceramic dance across the frame. The artwork is detailed with American flags placed amidst the other ceramic pieces, each painted with a shadowy fist raised in silhouette against the stripes.

Also included are her Mondo Negro series of lithographs. This presentation of works, shown together for the first time, honors Billops’s canonical output as an artist-activist. In five variations, Billops portrays in bold, slanting lines, characters and snakes at times falling and at times burning in abstracted landscapes portraying a “black world.”  The series continues to bring her perceptive artwork into conversation not only with its own multimedia contexts, but also with those broader contexts that are presciently resonant within them.