Barbara Chase-Riboud

For over five decades, Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1936) has created abstract art with a deep and nuanced understanding of history, identity, and a sense of place. Her celebrated work operates on several dichotomies that have become central to her practice: hard/soft, male/female, flat/sculptural, stable/fluid, figurative/abstract, powerful/delicate, brutal/beautiful, violence/harmony. In 1958, she developed her own particular innovation on the historical direct lost-wax method of casting bronze sculpture. Creating thin sheets of wax that she could bend, fold, meld, or sever, she developed singular models that she would then bring to a local foundry for casting. This new approach to a centuries-old process enabled her to produce large-scale sculptures comprised of ribbons of bronze and aluminum. In 1967, she added fiber to these metal elements, conceiving the seemingly paradoxical works for which she is most renowned: sculptures of cast metal resting on supports hidden by cascading skeins of silk or wool so that the fibers appear to support the metal. Of these works were a group of steles memorializing Malcolm X and his transformation “from a convict to a world leader.” His assassination in 1965, which upset the artist, was the impetus for the creation of her first works in the series, begun in 1969. Additions to the series came in 2003, 2007–08 and 2016–17, totaling twenty sculptures. Known collectively as the Malcolm X Steles, the first thirteen sculptures were exhibited in 2014 to acclaim at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum (University of California Berkeley). In 2017, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presented Barbara Chase-Riboud—Malcolm X: Complete, the artist’s second large-scale solo exhibition at the gallery which celebrated the completion of the series and represented the first time that fourteen of the twenty steles were shown together. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue featuring a recent interview with the artist by Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Born in 1936 in Philadelphia, Barbara Chase-Riboud began taking art classes at the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial at an early age. Wrongly accused of plagiarizing a poem she had written, Autumn Leaves, her mother had her removed from middle school and tutored at home before enrolling her in the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948. Four years later, Chase-Riboud graduated from high school and began studying at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Following an exhibition of her prints at the ACA Gallery in New York in 1954, The Museum of Modern Art purchased her woodcut Reba in 1955. The following year, she graduated from Temple with a BFA, won a Mademoiselle guest-editorship award and moved to New York to take a job with Charm magazine. In 1957, on the recommendation of noted art director Leo Lionni, she won a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome. While in Rome, in 1958, she had her first European exhibitions at the American Academy and at Galleria L’Obelisco and her work was included in the first annual Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto. At this time, she also traveled to Egypt, an experience which would profoundly influence her mature work. She returned to the United States in September of 1958 with a fellowship to pursue her MFA at Yale University School of Design and Architecture, where she studied with Josef Albers, Phillip Johnson, Paul Rand, and Alvin Eisenman. Soon after, her sculpture Bull-Fighter was included in the 1958 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Mellon Institute. At Yale, Chase-Riboud encountered the British architect Sir James Stirling, a visiting critic, who proposed to her shortly afterwards. In 1960, the twenty-one-year-old artist completed her first commissioned public work, the Wheaton Plaza Fountain in Maryland (whereabouts unknown), and received her MFA from Yale, the first African American woman to do so. Chase-Riboud did not attend commencement; she moved instead to London to rejoin Stirling.

Later that year, Chase-Riboud left London to settle in France. In Paris, she was hired as an art director by the New York Times International and began a successful sculpting career, establishing her studio in 1962 on rue Blomet. Subsequent studios included those on rue Dutot and rue des Plantes in Paris, as well as the one at her country home, La Chenillère, in the Loire Valley, where she neighbored with Alexander Calder. In Paris, she met and befriended Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Georges Mathieu, Man Ray, Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, among other notable cultural figures. She also met Henri Cartier-Bresson and his protégé, legendary photojournalist Marc Eugène Riboud, whom she later married. In 1965, Chase-Riboud traveled to the People’s Republic of China, with Riboud, as the first American woman invited to visit the country since its political revolution. The following year, she received a sculpture commission from fashion designer Pierre Cardin and represented the United States in the first World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal. Later that same year, she also had her first major gallery show, held at the Galerie Cadran Solaire in Paris. In 1969, the exhibition 7 Américains de Paris opened at the Galerie Air France in New York, where Chase-Riboud exhibited five new sculptures including Sheila, which, significantly, was her first work to combine cast metal and fiber. She also traveled to Algiers, Algeria for the first Pan-African Cultural Festival. In 1970, four works from the Malcolm X series were shown at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York and later that year, at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. At this time, the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York began representing the artist. In 1970, she participated in the exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, becoming, alongside Betye Saar, one of the first African American woman artists exhibited at the museum. In 1973, the exhibition Chase-Riboud, organized by Peter Selz, was shown at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, CA, traveling to the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In 1974, she held solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany. In 1975, following an exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, she departed on a month-long lecture and solo exhibition tour of Africa, organized by the U.S. State Department, with venues in Tunisia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Senegal. In 1977, she was included in the prestigious Documenta VI in Kassel, Germany and two years later, she participated in the 3^rd Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue in Sydney, Australia. In 1980, Chase-Riboud divorced Marc Riboud and the following year, she married Italian art publisher Sergio Tosi, a collaborator of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Lucio Fontana, Cy Twombly, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and other prominent artists.

In 1985, Barbara Chase-Riboud established a studio in the Palazzo Ricci in Rome, close to where Cy Twombly resided. In 1990, she began her La Musica series, inspired by singer Marian Anderson and she participated in the Pasadena City College’s fourth annual Artists in Residence program. In 1995, she exhibited in the Fujisankei Biennale International Exhibition for Contemporary Sculpture at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan. That same year, Chase-Riboud won a commission from the U.S. General Services Administration to create the sculpture Africa Rising, commemorating the recently discovered African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, a colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans. Three years later, Africa Rising would be installed in the lobby of the Ted Weiss Federal Building, adjacent to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, where it can be viewed to this day. In 1996, she began work on her Monument Drawings series, created, as with the Malcolm X series, as tributes to historical figures. The series culminated in a traveling exhibition, originating at the St. John's Museum of Art (now the Cameron Art Museum) in Wilmington, NC, that was later on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1999. That year, Peter Selz and Anthony F. Janson completed their monograph Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculptor, published by Harry N. Abrams. In 2001, Chase-Riboud participated in the famed exhibition Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth at the British Museum, London, with her work Cleopatra's Marriage Contract. In 2009, the Johns Hopkins University Press published a special issue of the journal Callaloo, devoted entirely to the artist.

Although known for her achievements in sculpture and drawing, Chase-Riboud is equally renowned for her literary success. In 1974, she published her first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking, edited by Toni Morrison and published by Random House, to critical acclaim. Five years later, with the encouragement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she published her first novel, Sally Hemings (Viking Press, 1979), which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction by an American Woman. The book, about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, became an international bestseller and would later be translated into ten languages. Its sequel, The President’s Daughter, was published by Crown Publishers in 1994. Other works in literature include Valide: A Novel of the Harem (William Morrow, 1986); a book of poetry Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (William Morrow, 1989), which won the Carl Sandburg Award for best American poet from the International Platform Association; Echo of Lions: A Novel of the Amistad, about the Amistad revolt (William Morrow, 1989); and Roman Égyptien, a book of French poetry (Éditions du Félin, 1994). In 2003, Hottentot Venus was published by Doubleday, a historical novel about Sarah Baartman, which was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for Fiction. In 2007, she returned to China to complete a travelogue of her 1965 trip, titled 10,000 Kilometers of Silk. In 2011, she completed an English version of Roman Égyptien (titled Egypt’s Nights) and the historical novel The Great Mrs. Elias. In 2013, she completed the following literary works: Helicopter, a verse novel; I Always Knew: A Memoir; Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God Is Released: Collected and New Poems, 1974-2011; and Pannonica & Thelonious, a melologue for a screenplay. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s papers and manuscripts were acquired by Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) in 2014.

Chase-Riboud has been the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, including: a Doctorate of Fine Arts from Temple University (1981), a Doctorate of Letters from Muhlenberg College (1993), the James Van Der Zee Award (now known as the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award) from the Brandywine Workshop (1995), a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Connecticut (1996), the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association (2007), the Alain Locke International Award from the Detroit Institute of Arts (2007), and the Tannie Award in the Visual Arts in Paris (2013). In 1996, she was knighted by the French government as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Her work has also been exhibited at numerous institutions worldwide. In 2017, she was featured in the exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at The Museum of Modern Art, and her sculpture Confessions for Myself (1972), which was commissioned by Peter Selz and the Berkeley Art Museum for her first single-artist museum exhibition in 1973, was on view in We Wanted a Revolution: Black, Radical Women, 1965-85 at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2018, work by Chase-Riboud was on view in the exhibitions Out of Easy Reach (Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, IL); Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA); and In the Eye of the Beholder (Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL). She was included in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019) and Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, curated by Adrienne L. Childs, at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2020). Her work was also featured in the spotlight installation “New Monuments,” part of the permanent collection exhibition Collection 1940s-1970s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019. From 2019 – 2020, Chase-Riboud’s work was included in Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2020, her work was presented in the solo exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Avatars, part of the series “Matters of Concern | Matières à panser,” curated by Guillaume Désanges at La Verrière, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Brussels, Belgium.

From 2022–23, several major exhibitions dedicated to Chase-Riboud opened to critical acclaim. The Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis mounted the retrospective Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes, the largest monographic exhibition of her career thus far; the Museum of Modern Art opened The Encounter. Barbara Chase-Riboud/Alberto Giacometti a two-artist show drawn from the permanent collection; and Serpentine Galleries organized the artist’s first solo exhibition in London, Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds, which focused on her large-scale sculpture and works on paper.

Works by Chase-Riboud belong to museum collections around the world including the Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba; Colby College Museum of Art, Colby College, Waterville, ME; Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA; Harlem Art Collection, New York State Office of General Services, Albany, NY and New York, NY; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; National Collections of France, Ministry of Culture, Paris, France; National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York, NY; The Galleries at Pasadena City College, Pasadena City College, Pasadena, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; St. John’s University, Queens, NY; Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA; The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exclusively represented Barbara Chase-Riboud from 2014–2019. Chase-Riboud continues to live and work between Paris, Rome, and Milan.