The Second World War had been raging for two years in 1941 when Georgine Hill arrived in Bermuda with her husband Hilton Hill II and their infant son.
Hill returned to her native Boston numerous times, but Bermuda became her permanent home. She has made important contributions to the Island as an artist, teacher and activist.
A singer who was known as the Marian Anderson of Bermuda, and a portrait painter who helped found the Bermuda Art Association, one of the Island’s earliest arts organizations, Hill was also the first art teacher in the Government school system.
As an activist, she helped launch an anti-segregation protest in 1951 that attracted international attention and became a precursor to the groundbreaking 1959 Theatre Boycott.
She has been recognized for her involvement in all facets of the arts. She is an honorary trustee of the National Dance Foundation of Bermuda, which named one of four commemorative awards, The Georgine Mary Russell Hill Scholarship, in her honour.
She is a founding trustee of the Bermuda National Gallery (BNG). A BNG 2004 show “A Tribute to Georgine Hill” introduced the artist and her work to a new generation of art enthusiasts.
Hill is both descended from and married into a family of activists and high achievers. She is the youngest of three daughters of Harvard University-educated dentist Dr. Alfred P. Russell and his wife Maybelle, a pianist and organist who attended the New England Conservatory of Music.
Maybelle’s father, Dr. George Franklin Grant, was the first black member of the faculty of Harvard’s dental school and also made history with his invention of the golf tee. Maybelle’s grandfather John Jay Smith was a leading Boston abolitionist.
Hill studied music and dance as a child, but was most attracted to art. After graduating from Girls Latin, she attended the Massachusetts College of Art.
She met Hilton Hill, who was studying at Boston University, during her college years, and the two subsequently married. Hill was the son of Hilton Hill, a businessman and parliamentarian, and a grandson of Samuel David Robinson, a leading businessman, prominent property owner and a founder of The Berkeley Institute.
The young family spent their first years at Princess Street, Hamilton, where the Robinson-Hill clan owned a string of properties. They later moved to Spice Hill, Warwick where they raised their son, Hilton “Buddy” Hill III and daughter, June.
During her first years in Bermuda, Hill joined a music circle where she met Berkeley Institute music teacher Joseph Richards. She took voice lessons from Richards. Soon she was performing as a soloist at church concerts and the Colonial Opera House.
Her contralto voice invited comparisons with the pioneering African American opera singer Marian Anderson. She was also the featured soloist at concerts presented by American baritone Dr. Furnam Fletcher Fordham for two decades, beginning in 1954.
Art was always a constant in her life. When the Second World War ended, Hill joined forces with artists and art enthusiasts helping to create a more vibrant art scene. In 1947, she became a founding member of the Bermuda Art Association with Sir Stanley Spurling and Christine Diel. The Art Association, which merged with another group to form the Bermuda Society of Arts in 1956, made a very important contribution to the development of the arts, and because of its integrated membership, to the wider society as well.
The Association was based at Hamilton Hotel, the site of the current City Hall, where it held art classes for adults and children, exhibited members’ works and organised exchange shows with U.S.
Sculptor Byllee Lang who moved to Bermuda from Canada in 1946 was one of the Association’s first teachers. Hill and Lang went on to establish an annual exhibition of children’s art, which was the forerunner to the BSoA’s annual schools’ show. Hill was a long-time member of the BSoA’s executive.
Hill’s teaching career began in 1956 when she was asked to give art lessons to dressmaking students at the Girls Institute of Arts and Crafts. When Albert Jackson appealed to her to teach his students at St. George’s Secondary School as well, she shuttled between both schools for two terms. Her first year in the classroom was a labour of love. Hill was not salaried and provided her own supplies.
But the Department of Education somehow managed to find funds for her salary by the start of her second year. Winning tangible support for arts education was an amazing feat for the era—it was an indication of Hill’s force of personality.
When Hill retired in 1975 after 21 years in the classroom, she could count establishing the first public school arts curriculum and using the arts as a positive force for student development, as her main achievements. She ended her teaching career at Prospect Secondary School.
Hill helped strike a blow at segregation in Bermuda in 1951 when she, along with her husband and sister-in-law, Carol Hill, led a demonstration to protest the policies of the Bermudiana Theatre Club, which was presenting a season of plays performed by a professional U.S. company.
News of the protest, which began after she and Carol Hill were denied tickets to a performance because they were not of “unmixed European descent”, filtered back to the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The U.K. government ordered the Governor not to attend the opening night performance, the Actors Equity Guild lodged an official complaint, and the club ultimately dropped its discriminatory policy.
It was a quiet and quickly forgotten victory, but filmmaker Errol Williams stumbled upon the episode and gave Carol and Georgine Hill a star turn in his award-winning 2002 film about the 1959 Theatre Boycott, When Voices Rise…
In the years following the protest, Hill teamed up with a group of intellectuals and activitists who were seeking to improve social and political conditions in Bermuda. They produced and distributed a document “An Analysis of Social Problems” calling for sweeping changes, including an end to government-sanctioned segregation and the property-based voting system.
Hill exhibited her work regularly in Bermuda during her younger years but was always very selective about her subjects. She once said:” I was never a commercial artist. I always painted people who I found interesting, just as an actor chooses interesting roles.”
She received commissions to paint portraits of notable Bermudians, among them educator and author Dr. Kenneth Robinson and top civil servant Ruth Seaton James. As recently as 2004, she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Dr. Otelia Cromwell, the first black graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, where her daughter, pediatrician Dr. June Hill, studied as an undergraduate.
Hill was a political wife during a period when major social change was on the horizon. Hill’s husband served in the House of Assembly as a MCP from 1953 to 1958 and was a member of a parliamentary Inter-racial Committee, established to examine segregation.
But his options as a journalist and photographer were limited, and he moved overseas, where he established a travel business, marketing Bermuda as a destination for black Americans, and later Africa.
When Hill retired from teaching, she accompanied her husband on his travels. He died in 2000. Her community work includes serving on the board of Teen Services for many years, including a long-time stint as chairman.
Hill is the recipient of an MBE and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council.
On January 8, 2010, weeks before her 91st birthday, she was one of 12 Bermudians recognized by Imagine Bermuda, a community organization dedicated to achieving equality and racial harmony.
In 2012, she was presented with the Bermuda Arts Council’s Patron Award.
