Black Soho Re-created at Independent 20th Century Art Fair

A booth at the Independent 20th Century fair in New York is re-creating the energy of one of downtown Manhattan's most consequential gathering places: the loft at 491 Broadway where Camille Billops and her husband, James Hatch, collected and stewarded a vast compendium of Black artistic history.

The presentation, titled "Black Soho," is co-produced by RYAN LEE and Salon 94 galleries and remains on view through Sunday, September 27. It pairs an assortment of ephemera from the Billops-Hatch Collection with works by artists who lived in or spent considerable time shaping the neighborhood south of Houston Street: Emma Amos, Billops herself, Vivian Browne, David Hammons, Ed Clark, Norman Lewis, Frederick J. Brown, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The loft's story begins in 1973, when Billops and Hatch bought the Broadway space. Over the decades they lived there together, it came to house periodicals, scripts, photographs, audiotaped interviews and more. The number of artists immortalized in the archive surpassed one thousand.

One artifact from that world carries the intimate tone of the friendship that sustained it. In the winter of 1988, Emma Amos scribbled a note to Billops, her friend and fellow artist: "Camille — Here are 10 new slides for the ARCHIVES." The note accompanied a gift: an addition to Billops's quickly multiplying library.

The archive, now held at Emory University's Rose Library, documented a neighborhood that these artists helped define. The fair booth extends that documentation into the present, setting archival material alongside paintings and works on paper by the circle of artists the loft once welcomed.

Gallerist Jeff Lee told Hyperallergic that he and his collaborators took their cue from Billops and Hatch's community-minded endeavors in conceiving the exhibition. "We wanted to emulate the energy of that loft. It was an incredible gathering space for so many major artists of her generation, but also younger generations," Lee said.

The booth's timing gives it added weight. As the art market's attention shifts between fairs and seasons, "Black Soho" makes the case that a commercial booth can double as an act of historical recovery, tying names like Basquiat and Hammons back to the physical neighborhood and the networks of exchange — slides passed between friends, interviews taped, scripts saved — that sustained them.

For visitors to Independent 20th Century before Sunday, the presentation offers a rare chance to see archival ephemera and artworks by more than a dozen Black artists who shaped Soho inside a single fair display.