Before the Black Eyed Peas were a stadium act fronted by Will.i.am and Fergie, they were a trio of quirky Los Angeles-based rappers who often collaborated with Black female singers. Macy Gray, best known for her 1999 hit “I Try,” sang on their first two albums, released in 1998 and 2000. But their closest female collaborator in those days was Kim Hill.
Hill, now 54, never formally joined the group (she got her own solo deal with the band’s label, Interscope Records), but she toured with them for five years and contributed vocal hooks to tracks like “The Way U Make Me Feel” (which she co-wrote) and “What It Is,” both released in 1998. The video for the latter shows her mugging for the camera alongside Will, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and, while her sultry vocals temper their young-man energy, she’s too goofy and fully clothed (in a fuzzy tangerine bucket hat, jeans and a trench coat) to present as what she calls a “come hither” chanteuse.
That kind of typecasting never appealed to Hill. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. — where she sang gospel at church but also performed with the city’s predominantly white children’s choir — she learned to use her wit to put people at ease and honed her sense of when it was time to make an exit. “I never feel like I have to be stuck somewhere that doesn’t feel good energetically or spiritually,” she says. “When it’s time to dip, it’s time to dip.”
After majoring in dance at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. Label representatives looking for the new Mariah or Whitney were befuddled by this Black girl performing folksy songs with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats. But she connected with the Peas’ misfit energy when she met them at an artist showcase in 1995. She remembers thinking, “These are my people.”
For the next five years, Hill traveled the world with the group, but eventually, she believes, her bandmates seemed to resent the attention she was getting from fans and the press. At the label, she perceived an ambient though unspoken discontent about her refusal to sexualize her image. In 2000, she says, she got word that the band was getting a raise from which she’d been excluded and felt sure it was time to part ways. When the Peas’ third album, “Elephunk” (2003), introduced Fergie — who proved central to their crossover success — Hill watched the group’s ascent with the pain of one left behind, as well as some big-sisterly pride.
In 2010, she decided to return to the East Coast — settling in Brooklyn, then later, Newark, N.J. — to focus on her son Cassius, who was born that year. She got her real estate license in 2013 and still works in the field, occasionally in the luxury market but primarily helping to find homes for people living with H.I.V./AIDS or in domestic violence shelters. During the pandemic, she longed for a creative outlet and found that weaving felt natural to her, almost akin to hair braiding, so she began making lawn chairs inspired by both her own collection of North African and Indonesian furniture and the aluminum-and-woven-plastic fold-up seats that her grandmother used for entertaining. Hill stripped four of those inherited chairs down to their frames and rewove them with water-resistant macramé in bright colors like lime and magenta. When a developer of the Rockaway Hotel in Queens, after spotting them on Instagram, ordered 27, Hill’s business, Hazel & Shirley, named after her grandmother and mother, was born. By 2022, Hill’s creations included vibrant wall hangings, as well as portraits of languid Black figures that she started painting after an art instructor advised her to capture not just what she saw but what she felt — an approach that reminded her of making music.
Hill has now exhibited her work with the interior designer and curator Tione Trice’s Of the Cloth studio and at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Express Newark arts center and the Newark Museum of Art. She’s made over 200 chairs, which are currently available at the Black Home in Brooklyn, Salte on Martha’s Vineyard and Space on Nantucket.
Still, she hasn’t completely given up on music; she plans to release new songs, recorded in her home studio, next year. And as she builds this multidisciplinary stage of her career, she maintains the right to dip if it doesn’t suit her. “There’s a saying, ‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, build your table,’” she says. “Well, you can also bring a seat, and pick up that seat and move it. Sometimes you realize, ‘Oh, this ain’t my table.’ Get up!”
Photo assistants: Mark Jayson Quines, Jacob Barnes
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