Hello All:
The population of the Realm of Ancestor/Angel increased recently and we are both at a loss and simultaneously grateful for their having lived among us. I mentioned that five have made their transition - Four are featured here in the articles below; the fifth, *Dr. Niara Sudarkasa, former president of my Alma Mater, Lincoln University, and the first woman to serve in that capacity, will be covered in a separate Post.
My condolences to the family, friends and fans of these wonderful Brothers and Sisters. We will treasure and honor their contributions to our lives -
Stay Blessed &
ECLECTICALLY BLACK
Gloria
IN MEMORIAM
Camille Billops
(1933 – 2019)
J. Michael Dash
(1948 – 2019)
Joe Overstreet
(1933 – 2019)
It is with great sadness we announce the
passing of these three great collaborators, colleagues and friends of
the Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual
Culture:
Although Camille Billops (1933 – June 1, 2019) began her career as a sculptor, ceramist, and painter, Billops is best known for documentary works like
Finding Christa (1991) which the Institute/Center had once
screened as part of its programming. The 55-minute film recounts why
Billops gave up her four-year-old daughter and how they reconnected more
than two decades later. When the film showed at the
Sundance Film Festival in 1992, Finding Christa received the
Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, making Billops the first Black woman
to win the award. In 1968, the Hatch-Billops Collection began with
James Hatch, a professor of theater at UCLA. Responding
to the lack of publications on African American art and culture,
Billops and Hatch began collecting thousands of books and other printed
materials, more than 1,200 interviews, and scripts of nearly 1,000
plays. Once housed in a SoHo loft in lower Manhattan,
the Collection is now largely located as an archive in their name at
the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library at Emory
University in Atlanta. From 1981-1999, Billops oversaw
Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History,
an annual journal featuring interviews with noted American
"marginalized artists" across a wide range of genres. Billops was also
a printmaker and educator.
Professor Jean Michael Dash (1948 –
June 2, 2019) had been a long-time supporter
of the Institute/Center’s programming. In 2016, he moderated one of
the conversations in The Caribbean Imaginary Series
(https://nyuiaaa.org/event-
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mississippi-born painter
Joe Overstreet
(1933 – June 4, 2019) was associated with the Abstract Expressionist
movement. During the Civil Rights Movement he became known for works
such as
Strange Fruit and The New Jemima, which reflected his
interest in contemporary social issues and the Black Arts Movement. He
also worked with Amiri Baraka as the Art Director for the Black Arts
Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem, and in 1974
he co-founded Kenkeleba House, an East Village gallery and studio. In
the 1980s he returned to figuration with his
Storyville paintings, which recall the New Orleans jazz scene of
the early 1900s. His work draws on a variety of influences, including
his own African American heritage, and has been exhibited in galleries
around the world.
Overstreet was a major innovator in
taking the canvas off the wall. In his “Flight Pattern” series of the
early 1970s, painted, unstretched canvases are tethered with ropes to
the ceiling, walls, and floor.
Over the past several decades, Overstreet
has been a relentless experimenter– investigating both the spatial and
textural possibilities of painting, and also complex cultural histories.
His artwork is featured on the cover of
Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire (Summer 2018 Vol. 18 No.2)
published by the Institute of African American Affairs & Center for
Black Visual Culture, New York University.
Dr. Patricia Bath, 76, Who Took On Blindness and Earned a Patent, Dies
 |
| Dr. Patricia Bath in about 1980. |
A doctor, researcher and educator, she
took a special interest in combating preventable blindness in
underserved populations. Creditvia Eraka Bath
Patricia
E. Bath, an ophthalmologist who took a special interest in combating
preventable blindness in underserved populations and along the way
became the first black female doctor to patent a medical invention, a laser device for treating cataracts, died on Thursday in San Francisco. She was 76.
Her daughter, Eraka Bath, said Dr. Bath had died after a brief illness.
Dr.
Bath was an educator and researcher as well as a physician. She began
her medical career in New York and in 1974 joined the faculties of the
University of California, Los Angeles, and the Charles R. Drew
University of Medicine and Science in that city.
When
she was just out of medical school, working as an intern at Harlem
Hospital and then at an eye clinic at Columbia University, she noticed
discrepancies in vision problems between the largely black patient
population at Harlem and the largely white one at Columbia. Her
observations led her to document that blindness was twice as prevalent
among black people as among white people — findings that instilled in
her a lifelong commitment to bringing quality eye care to those who
might not otherwise have access to it.
In
the early 1980s, her work with cataract patients and related research
led her to envision the device that became known as the laserphaco
probe, which uses laser technology to remove cataracts, which cloud the
lens of the eye.
“When
she first conceived of the device in 1981, her idea was more advanced
than the technology available at the time,” according to a biography of
Dr. Bath in Changing the Face of Medicine,
an online exhibition of the National Library of Medicine that
spotlights women in medicine. “It took her nearly five years to complete
the research and testing needed to make it work and apply for a patent.
Today the device is use worldwide.”
Dr.
Bath in an undated photo. Her “personal best moment,” she said, was
when she used an implant procedure to restore the sight of a North
African woman who had been blind for 30 years.Creditvia Eraka Bath
The
United States Patent and Trademark Office, which has singled out Dr.
Bath’s achievement several times over the years, said in a 2014 news release that the device had “helped restore or improve vision to millions of patients worldwide.”
By
the time her patent for the device was approved in 1988, Dr. Bath was
well along in her quest to bring eye care to people with limited access
to health care. In 1976 she was a founder of the nonprofit American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness,
along with Alfred Cannon, a psychiatrist, and Aaron Ifekwunigwe, a
pediatrician. The organization has promoted what Dr. Bath called
community ophthalmology, which advances optic health through grass-roots
screenings, treatments and education.
In
an interview for the Changing the Face of Medicine exhibition, Dr. Bath
described her “personal best moment”: using an implant procedure called
keratoprosthesis to restore the sight of a woman in North Africa who
had been blind for 30 years.
Patricia Bath On Being The First Person To Invent & Demonstrate Laserphaco Cataract Surgery | TIME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcE_QMTBNW4#action=share |
“The ability to restore sight is the ultimate reward,” she said.
Patricia
Era Bath was born in Harlem on Nov. 4, 1942. Her father, Rupert, an
immigrant from Trinidad, was a motorman for the New York City subway
system. Her mother, Gladys (Elliott) Bath, worked as a housekeeper and,
Dr. Bath often said, sparked her interest in science by buying her a
chemistry set when she was a girl.
“I wanted to pretend-play and model myself after scientists,” she told Time magazine when it included her in its “Women Who Are Changing the World”
project in 2017. “When we would play nurse and doctor, I didn’t want to
be forced to play the role of the nurse. I wanted to be the one with
the stethoscope, the one who gave the injections, the one in charge.”
Dr.
Bath as a 17-year-old high school student in New York City in 1960. She
was featured in The New York Times, along with another teenager, after a
cancer study they had helped write was presented in Washington.CreditHerbert S. Sonnenfeld
She
was a top student at Charles Evans Hughes High School in Manhattan, now
closed, and at 17 she was featured in The New York Times along with
another teenager, Arnold Lentnek, after a cancer study they had helped
write was presented at the International Congress on Nutrition in
Washington.
She studied chemistry and
physics at Hunter College in Manhattan, earning a bachelor’s degree
there in 1964, and received her medical degree at Howard University in
Washington in 1968. She then returned to New York to do an internship at
Harlem Hospital and a fellowship at Columbia, setting the stage for her
insights into the racial disparities in statistics on blindness and her
proposals for community ophthalmology.
“Disproportionate
numbers of blacks are blinded by preventable causes,” Dr. Bath wrote in
a 1979 paper in the Journal of the National Medical Association.
“However, thus far, no national strategies exist for reducing the
excessive rates of blindness among the black population.”
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