Mixed Materials: Reflections on the Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch

Alexandra Nicome is a 2025-2026 recipient of the Billops-Hatch Fellowship, which supports researchers working in the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives. Among its various holdings, the Billops-Hatch archives has more than 1,200 play scripts written by African Americans, 1,400 interviews with various artists, and a library of rare and unique books and periodicals. 

As a short-term research fellow at the Stuart A. Rose Library, I spent a week looking through the archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch. Artist, playwright, filmmakers, and archivists, in the 1970s the couple began building a large collection of oral history interviews, ephemera, and books. The materials eventually transferred from their New York City loft to Emory University. I arrived at the Rose Library with an ambitious request list because the collection is large and varied, and I hoped to touch at least a small part of each series. As an archivist-in-training with a special interest in art history, my research attends to the history of the intellectual and physical arrangement of the Billops-Hatch Archives. I am especially interested in how their organizational schemes were influenced by – or in some cases influenced – the artistic movements that are documented in their archives.

I began my visit looking for traces of Billops and Hatch across Emory’s collections, including the papers of close friend and artist Benny Andrews; fellow archivist and collector Delilah Jackson; writer and scholar Michel Fabre; and playwright Owen Dodson. Leafing through documents from this small slice of their professional network gave me a sense of their relationships and how they described their archival work. One of my favorites from this portion of the visit is a letter from Hatch to Michel Fabre in which he asks his Paris-based friend for help securing a shipment of books from L’Harmattan [Figure 1]. According to the 1980 letter, Hatch and Billops bought 42 titles from the bookshop and publishers, but their limited French led to some miscommunication. Only a small portion of the purchase actually made its way to the United States. Hatch’s effort to recover the rest of their books gave me a sense of where they sourced titles for their large personal library and which publishers they sought to support. I can see how a future bibliographic project might be enhanced by Emory materials outside the formal limits of the Billops-Hatch Archives.

After I got a sense of the couples’ presence beyond the collection proper, I turned to their personal papers. Ordered chronologically, James Hatch’s correspondence demonstrates their consistent creative output. He was in conversation with scholars, publishers, librarians, collectors, students and mentees, poets and playwrights, and emissaries, often in preparation for one of their numerous trips abroad. In addition to showing the breadth of their creative practices and their skill as administrators, the personal papers provide some exposition where the Billops and Hatch’s archival practices are opaque. On this point, the Billops-Hatch personal papers are separate from their archive; the former contains personal and administrative documents accumulated over their lifetimes while the latter reflects their deliberate collecting practice. One of the more curious counterparts to the personal papers in the official archive is their collection of postcards. While most of the postcards do not contain personal notes, several do, and for this reason I think its worth asking why they are arranged as distinct, aesthetic objects rather than personal ephemera.

The postcard series is subdivided into several topics – artists, places, period images, etc. – and I took some time to flip through the “artists” section. The cards are organized alphabetically by last name. Billops and Hatch devised simple call numbers for the series, marking most postcards with a letter-number combination. I speculate these cards functioned as a casual reference collection; a slide library, but with postcards. A great example of the layered personal / reference status of these objects appears on an undated card that, on its front, shows an image composed by photographer James Collins (1939-2021) [Figure 2]. Along the surface of the back, a personal note and call number are written in red ink and graphite pencil, respectively [Figure 3]. These banal details are my bread and butter: why is a postcard with a personal inscription organized as a reference object? How would visitors to the Hatch-Billops Archive at 491 Broadway, New York (the archive’s original and longtime location) have used this collection? How does their act of archival ordering transform the status of these objects?

Every archive is idiosyncratic in some way, but Billops and Hatch singularly intervened in the conventions of the form by dictating the arrangement and limits of their collection; this work is usually performed by archivists, not the creators of the archival materials. Under their model of order, artist James Collins’s photograph A Domestic Dialogue supersedes the actual domestic content scrawled across the back of the image; through their standard of physical and intellectual arrangement, Hatch and Billops train researchers like me to look at objects as they see them.

Of the many other items I encountered during my trip, I would like to close with a short account of Camille Billops’s prints. Before visiting the Billops-Hatch Archives at Emory, I had only seen digital reproductions of her print work. Unlike the display contexts of a computer screen, or a museum or gallery, the reading room allowed me the opportunity to page through her etchings. Unmediated by pixels or glass, I was able to get close to her work and look for water marks, examine working and artist proofs, and trace techniques Billops either abandoned or developed. Because I am interested in the formation and organizational life of the Billops-Hatch Archive, I was most excited to find a playful hand-colored etching titled Rescue [Figure 4]. Printed in the year 2000, the image depicts a lively scene in which the Hatch-Billops archive hosts readers, writers, artists, and lecturers, as four parachuters descend with “donations” and “needed” written across their canopies. This image contains so many story-book-like details that reveal something of Billops’s perception of the archive, but for now I am focused on the overlapping boundaries between internal and external, private and public space. What is important for me here is that they haven’t abandoned the essential character of a boundary that makes a space coherent – they maintain the basic structural features that enable “here” and “there” – but the yellow and white threshold to the etched Hatch-Billops Archive does not fix the limit of its influence.

During my visit to the Stuart A. Rose Library, I got a sense of how Hatch and Billops use the structure of the archive to exert pressure on objects and the categories that make them legible. I can’t wait to return to continue investigating their work, and look forward to reading about what other researchers discover in future visits.