Excavating the Basement: Reflections from the Billops-Hatch Collection   

Ebonie Pollock is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture department at Harvard University studying Black feminist art histories with a particular focus on Black women sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the 2024 recipient of the Billops-Hatch Fellowship at Rose Library. 

I had the privilege of conducting research at the Stuart Rose Library as a Billops-Hatch fellow in support of my dissertation “Gold Would Not be too Precious a Medium: The Material and Memory of Black American Women’s Figurative Sculpture.” My dissertation explores the polyphonic relationship between material conditions and artistic material within the art practice of Black women sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black artists of this period were largely excluded from the mainstream art market, which was a particularly troubling position for sculptors, who traditionally relied on systems of commission and patronage to address the often-prohibitive costs related to producing, transporting, and storing sculptural objects. I contend that Black women sculptors such as Meta Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, or Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, who faced the multiple jeopardy of race, class, and gender-based barriers, often produced work outside of the established material paradigm of marble and bronze. In my work, I seek to retrieve their work more fully from the historiographical margins of figurative sculpture within the canon of American art through the analysis of this phenomenon and its ramifications.  

To this end, I visited the Stuart Rose Library with the intention to consult the oral history collection built by Camille Billops and James Hatch. Comprised of interviews conducted with dozens of artists stretching from those active during the Harlem Renaissance through the 1980s, the collection serves as an invaluable resource for the study of twentieth century Black art. I spent the majority of my visit listening to first-hand accounts of the era, searching for reflections on Black women sculptors that served as prominent peers and mentors to the various artists surveyed. In the span of listening, a notable parallel emerged between two accounts of Augusta Savage and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet described by Ernest Crichlow and Romare Bearden, respectively. Both prominent artists of the next generation, Crichlow and Bearden reflected separately on the two sculptors in the guise of Grecian goddesses or sybils that they found, inexplicably, working out of basements.  

The paradox of this vision—two highly accomplished contributors to the field of Black American sculpture working in adverse conditions so far advanced in their careers—is illustrated by the surprise Crichlow described feeling in his youth when meeting Augusta Savage.  

Ernest Crichlow, February 22, 1974 (abbreviated transcription, my own):

I read that there was this woman artist living in Harlem who had traveled to Europe, which was about as fantastic and fabulous as being an artist as far as I was concerned. I was in my early teens, and I had never traveled to Harlem by myself and I decided I was going to look this artist up. I got off at at 125th street and walked to 135th street where she was supposed to be living. […] I didn’t realize it when she said downstairs […] but she really meant downstairs in the cellar. I remember going through there with a great deal of, with a very depressive feeling […] and finally going to knock on the door and feeling somewhat let down, because after all this was supposed to be going to see a Greek god, a goddess who, you know, had gotten some award and lived in Europe and then you come a find her in a basement, but when I opened the door, it was the greatest shock of my life, because I hadn’t been in any place at all where you open the door and see pictures and books lying around. And it was a rare afternoon, because that day that I came in there Robert Pious was painting Augusta at that time, and there she was up on the model stand like a Greek queen and there was Pious and he had on a smock and a palette. It was quite a number of years and it is just as vivid to me as if it just happened yesterday. So that’s Augusta Savage.[1] 

For his part, Bearden describes Prophet descending into the basement below her instructional space at the Atlanta University Center, where she joined the staff in 1934 after a twelve-year period of ex-patriation in Paris.  

Romare Bearden, October 30, 1986: It seemed a very nice community around that time, at the college.  

Int: Do you remember going over to the studio and meeting Elizabeth Prophet?  

RB: Yes, I certainly do. It was more like a mausoleum to me than a studio. […] Well, it was so still, and she walked around in these long, flowing robes, like some Greek sybil, and uh—there was a kind of unearthly smell to the place. I don’t mean something bad but I just can’t describe it. And then there was another place in the basement where you went down. She was working on some of her things.[2] 

Both recollections paint a different story regarding the artists personal comportment and temperament; nevertheless, there are striking similarities in the experiences described and the positions held by the artist. Furthermore, this paradox prefigures many concerns regarding the stewardship of the artists’ legacies that arose through the end of the twentieth century.  

Though the basements in which they worked belied a lack of adequate appreciation in their time, they possess an additional valence within an art historical context, evoking storage rooms piled high with artwork that has fallen outside of public interest, potentially remaining off view indefinitely. Alternately, the rhetoric of a Grecian ideal employed by both Crichlow and Bearden served as an easy metonym for the towering import—near deification—of the two sculptors, in the way that they leverage the foundational value structure of Western art history. Both accounts speak to the necessity of the work of breaking cycles of historic exclusion perpetuated in the present.  

I am grateful for the opportunity I received to engage with reflections on Black women sculptors as they were perceived by their broader community, which contributes to the ability to excavate their lives and their work from the “basement.” It is not lost on me that these accounts appeared without direct references to the sculptors in the finding aids or item descriptions. The expansive collections held at the Stuart Rose Library demonstrate that one must attend closely both to that which the archive explicitly yields as well as the material it implicitly obscures. My fellowship afforded me the ability to thoroughly explore the Hatch-Billops Collection and discover these reflections.

Citations:

1: Crichlow, Ernest, February 22, 1974 (HB336)[original: CD use copy], 6. Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives at Emory University, Manuscript Collection No. 927. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. 

2: Bearden, Romare, October 30, 1986, 0792148d-5816-4564-8cc5-fcd3ccd522d2. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.