“I will never forget the first time I met Romare Bearden. I didn’t expect to meet him, I didn’t expect to have that opportunity, but I went to an opening, and he was just sitting on the bench by himself. I went and sat next to him and said, ‘What do I need to know, if there was just one pearl you could pull out of the air?’
He said, ‘Always live near running water because the body is majority water, and it’ll help you tap into your creativity. Artists who don’t live near water, their work is angular and grid-like. But artists that live near running water, their creativity is fluid.’
I never forgot that.” Kimberly Camp, BAIA Talks, 11/20/2017
For Kimberly Camp, the ability to flow, to adapt—or like iconic martial artist, Bruce Lee, once famously quipped, to “be like water”—has been a lifelong endeavor. An artist for five decades, the Camden, New Jersey-born prodigy has forged a fluid and unprecedented dual career in art and art administration. Holding her first exhibition at age 12 in Woodbury, New Jersey, Camp has continued to successfully make art while becoming one of the most powerful art administrators in the nation.
In 1989, not long after receiving her master’s degree in Arts Administration from Drexel University, Camp was appointed founding director of the Smithsonian Institution Experimental Gallery, a newly-established unit of the Smithsonian. In 1994, she became president and CEO of what would become the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. There, she traveled the world to procure art for its nascent collection while managing the $65 million construction and opening of what was, at the time, the world’s largest museum devoted to African-American culture. In 1998, Camp became the only African American in the country to head a major collection upon taking control of the world-renowned Barnes Foundation, a multibillion-dollar art collection and educational institution now located in Philadelphia. Upon leaving Barnes, Camp spent six years creating a science, technology, and natural history project for the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center in Washington state before opening Galerie Marie in Collingswood, NJ, named for her late mother, where she features her own popular paintings and dolls alongside works by artists from around the world.
“Kimberly is someone who is able to pursue, with excellence, two different paths in life, the museum administration and the art making,” acknowledges Gabrielle Aruta, fine art professional and owner of Filo Sofi Arts, a contemporary gallery and education organization with locations in New York and New Jersey. Currently, Filo Sofi Arts is featuring Kimberly Camp: Spirit Guides, which runs through February 13, 2022. “It’s exciting to be around someone like that because we all have different aspects of our personality, and I think everybody feels like they have to compromise something,” offers Aruta, who considers Camp both “a mentor and a heroine” given the latter’s trailblazing career. “But Kimberly has beautifully pursued both these paths.” The art dealer further promotes how Camp, despite becoming a top art administrator, has “never given up on her dream and her purpose as an artist who tells incredible stories through doll making and painting.”
Consistently, such fluidity has facilitated Camp’s unique approach to art, one as varied as her stellar administrative career. She is the creator of “Kimkins,” a line of dolls with hand-painted faces, composed of suede cloth and dressed in traditional African fabrics. In the mid-1980s—a few years after a Kwanzaa bazaar where she introduced and sold out 55 hand-dyed dolls clothed in 32 traditional designs from numerous African countries—Camp was producing 2000 Kimkins a year. Today, almost four decades later, Camp’s award-winning paintings and dolls have been exhibited over 100 times throughout the world at such institutions as the Smithsonian, the American Craft Council Show, the International Sculpture Center, the University of Michigan, and the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild. Her art has been featured in numerous collections and traveling exhibitions, and her workshops and residencies include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Longwood Gardens, the Smithsonian, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.
“I collected textiles, beads, wolf teeth, bison teeth, snake vertebrae, fur, leather—any place I went, whatever they specialized in, I would do some research and figure out where to go,” reveals Camp, a longtime globetrotter. “When I came back from Morocco, I brought camel belly leather. Can’t get that here. When I went to Japan, I brought back silk, beads, and feathers, and when I went to Ghana, I brought back textiles and more beads,” she says, of the “encyclopedic collection of stuff” she employs in her art. “So that’s how I make my dolls.”
Camp’s childhood was equally remarkable and fluid. Reared in a family of creatives—her father, an artistically-inclined dental surgeon, her mother, a stay-at-home mom who went to business school after teaching her daughter to draw, sew, and paint—Camp showed early promise as both an artist and an intellect. After her mother set up a card table up in the living room with newspaper under it, Camp would sit there after school, drawing, painting, copper etching, and making plastic airplanes, plastic monsters, and race cars. The avid reader also spent countless hours in the library across the street from the local art supply store “picking up subjects that I wanted to know more about and teaching myself about them. At one point, I decided I needed to learn Latin, so I taught myself Latin. And then, I figured I needed to be a philosopher, so I started reading philosophy,” remembers Camp, noting “I read voraciously” and it “just opened up a whole world for me.” The gifted 12-year-old began taking art classes at the Friends School in Mullica Hill, New Jersey and, that same year, sold all her work at her debut exhibition in Woodbury.
A year later, Camp’s art instructor refused to teach her anymore. “She didn’t tell me this until decades later, but she was like, ‘Well, you were already better than me.’”
Not long after, Camp began studying painting and drawing under a graduate of The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna at the latter’s Merchantville, New Jersey residence. Great training, but the house, recalls Camp, had some issues. “We’d go in and sit around her dining room table and she would teach us art. She kept a parakeet in the other room because he was mean, and he would bite people.” That wasn’t all, given her tutor was the widow of an American ship captain. “Her house was literally haunted,” insists Camp. “We could hear people walking around upstairs, and we once asked her, ‘Who is up there?’ She told us the floor was empty, but we didn’t believe her, so she let us go up there,” recounts Camp, stressing there “wasn’t a soul up there… wasn’t a piece of furniture in the room.”
Upon closing in on her graduation from the Friends School at age 15, with college in mind, Camp received advice from the department chair that has stayed with her to this day. “He said, ‘You’re not good enough. Get a husband, have babies, you can play on the weekend. You’ll be fine.” Stunned, Camp later found out this administrator told all the women who graduated from the school the same thing. “I didn’t have a counterbalance of somebody saying, ‘Well, you know, don’t pay attention to him’ or ‘let’s sit down and talk about that,’” she explains, though subsequently being accepted to American University. There was more amazement, says Camp, that “I got into college at age 16, and not as much guidance about what that meant, and what I could do with it. I didn’t have that conversation about, ‘Do you want go to an HBCU? Do you wanna go Ivy League?’ she reflects, pointing out that her dad was the first of his generation to go to college. “I didn’t have that kind of guidance when I was coming up, and it wasn’t my parents’ fault. They didn’t know.”
Realizing American University was not a fit, Camp transferred after her first year to her father’s alma mater and her boyfriend’s school, the University of Pittsburgh. There, under the guidance of a female art professor, she pursued two majors in Studio Arts and Art History with a concentration on the art of Japan and China. “I took just about every class that she taught because she was the only one who was teaching art that was not about dead white men.”
Subsequently earning a master’s degree in Arts Administration from Drexel University in 1986, the stage was set for Camp’s dual career as she was already exhibiting art, organizing shows, making her dolls, and running the mural program for the city of Camden. She was soon hired by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts where she directed arts and education and minority arts services for two and a half years before connecting with someone who would change her life. At the time, Cheryl McClenney-Brooker was the vice president of external affairs for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and had been the “first African-American chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under the Carter administration,” points out Camp. “I interviewed her when she first came to Philadelphia, and we were all stunned by this beautiful, shorthaired, big-eyed Black woman who was at the art museum. We became friends, and Cheryl was really instrumental in my career.”
