Rujeko Hockley - Arnhold Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art 

"Camille Billops: Dissident Aesthete"

Camille Billops (1933–2019) was a New York legend. A self-determined Black woman and a storyteller, she devoted herself to speaking the unspoken through film, printmaking, teaching, ceramics, archival work, and community building. This lecture proposes Billops as a case study in dissident aesthetics, conducted at the scale of a life. The weekly salons Billops and her husband and collaborator James Hatch hosted at their SoHo loft from the 1970s onward, their publication Artist and Influence, and the oral histories, exhibition flyers, performance programs, audio recordings, and books they collected, were not adjacent to her practice as an artist; they were the practice. Against the erasures of a mainstream art world that frequently excluded artists of color and rarely noted their contributions, Billops and Hatch built an undeniable record and a road map for the future, itself an act of dissent. "Every creative, cultural, and racial experience has to do with my work. I sift and look and taste," Billops wrote. This lecture takes that syncretic method as its subject, offering a blueprint for a life in art in which art-making, truth-telling, and world-building are the same gesture.

IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2026-2027 | Dissident Aesthetics and the Remaking of Life