Barbara Chase-Riboud
Barbara Chase-Riboud is an American and French visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet.
After becoming established as a sculptor and poet, Chase-Riboud gained widespread recognition as an author for her novel Sally Hemings. It earned the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction, and became an international success.
Chase-Riboud's novel about Sally Hemings generated discussion about the likely relationship between the young enslaved woman and her master, Thomas Jefferson, who became president of the United States. Mainline historians rejected Chase-Riboud's portrayal and persuaded CBS not to produce a planned TV mini-series adapted from the novel. Following DNA analysis of descendants in 1998, the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is widely accepted by historians as fact, including those who had objected before.
From September 2024 to January 2025, the solo exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released showcased her sculpture, drawing and poetry from 1958 to the present in eight major institutions in Paris, France – Musée d’Orsay, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Musée du Louvre, Philharmonie de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Guimet and Palais de Tokyo – the first such celebration of a living artist.
Early life and education
Barbara Chase was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vivian May Chase, a histology technician, and Charles Edward Chase, a contractor. Chase displayed an early talent for the arts and began attending the Fleisher Art Memorial School at the age of eight. She was suspended from her middle school after being accused, mistakenly, of plagiarizing her poem "Autumn Leaves". She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls from 1948 to 1952, graduating summa cum laude. During graduation, her text "Of Understanding" was read. She continued her training at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art.In 1956, Chase received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School at Temple University. In that same year, Chase won a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome for 12 months. There, she created her first bronze sculptures and exhibited her work. During this time, she traveled to Egypt, where she discovered non-European art. In 1960, Chase completed a MFA degree from Yale University School of Design and Architecture. She is the first African-American woman to have received the MFA degree from Yale University. After completing her studies, Chase left the United States for London, England, and then Paris, France.
Career
Chase-Riboud is an acclaimed sculptor, poet, and novelist. She has worked across a variety of media throughout her long career.Visual arts
At Temple University's Tyler School of Art, she studied with Boris Blai and was "instructed in sculpture, painting, graphic design, printmaking, color theory, and restoration." She also studied anatomical drawing at Temple University School of Medicine.Chase-Riboud's modern abstract sculptures often combine the durable and rigid metals of bronze and aluminum with softer elements made from silk or other textile material. Using the lost wax method, Chase-Riboud carves, bends, folds, and manipulates large sheets of wax prior to casting molds of the handmade designs. She then pours the metal to produce the metal-work, which melts the original wax sculpture. The finished metal is then combined with material threads, which are manipulated into knots and cords, and often serve as the base for the metal portion of her sculptures, including those of the "Malcolm X Steles".
In 1955, her woodcut Reba was displayed in the Carnegie Hall Gallery as a part of the exhibit It's All Yours. This woodcut was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.
The Temple University yearbook Templar published fourteen of her woodcuts in 1956. She created her first direct wax-casting sculptures while at the American Academy in Rome in 1957 on a John Hay Whitney fellowship. In 1958 Chase began to experiment with bronze sculptures, using lost-wax casting techniques.
Her first solo exhibition was at the Galleria L'Obelisco at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy in 1957. Her first museum exhibition in Europe was held at MOMA Paris in 1961. Her first solo gallery exhibition in Paris was at the Galerie Cadran Solaire in 1966.
Her first public commission was completed in 1960 for the Wheaton Plaza in Wheaton, Maryland. This fountain was formed from pressed aluminum and incorporated abstract shapes, sound and light effects to add to the vision of the falling water.
In the late 1960s, Chase-Riboud began to garner broad attention for her sculpture. Nancy Heller describes her work as "startling, ten-foot-tall sculptures that combine powerful cast-bronze abstract shapes with veils of fiber ropes made from silk and wool".
Chase-Riboud exhibited work at the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, and she attended the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969.
Chase-Riboud and Betye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit in the Whitney Museum of American Art, following protests organized by Faith Ringgold to gain more recognition of Black women artists. Her piece The Ultimate Ground was displayed in the exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture.
In 1971, Chase-Riboud was featured along with four other contemporaries in Five, a documentary about African-American artists. The segment on Chase-Riboud showed her installation in 1970 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in addition to the artist working in her studio.
In 1996, Chase-Riboud was among artists commissioned for artwork at the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. Her 18-foot bronze memorial, Africa Rising, was installed in the Ted Weiss Federal Building in 1998. Chase-Riboud also wrote a poem with the same name as the sculpture.
Continuing to work as a sculptor throughout her life, Chase-Riboud creates drawings and sculptures that are exhibited and collected by museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Newark Museum, New Jersey, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. During September 2013 to January 2014, she exhibited artwork spanning fifty years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition: Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles. This traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from February 12 to April 28, 2014.
Her work was featured in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.
Her work is in major corporate collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Geigy Foundation, New York; and Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles.
From September 2024 to January 2025, the exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot Is Undone, A God Is Released, showcasing the artist's sculpture, drawing and poetry from 1958 to the present was on view across eight separate institutions in Paris: Musée d’Orsay, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Musée du Louvre, Philharmonie de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Guimet and Palais de Tokyo. The scale of the show and number of museums involved in the exhibition was described by The New York Times as a first for any living artist.
Literary career
Chase-Riboud has received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution. In 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Sally Hemings. The novel has been described as the "first full blown imagining" of Hemings and her life as a slave, including her long-rumored concubine relationship with President Thomas Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, as mainline historians of the time denied the relationship and the mixed-race children she bore to Jefferson, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. Sally Hemings sold more than one million copies in hardcover and it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It was reissued in 1994. In 2009, it was published in paperback, together with her novel, President's Daughter, about Harriet Hemings, daughter of Hemings and Jefferson, who passed into white society.
Chase-Riboud began her writing career as a poet, publishing her first work Memphis & Peking, edited by Toni Morrison, and more recent collections. Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released: Collected and New Poems 1974–2011 is Chase-Riboud's latest, published in 2014.
She has continued her literary exploration into the enslavement and exploitation of African people with her subsequent novels. Valide: A Novel of the Harem examined slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Her Echo of Lions was one of the first serious novels about the historic Amistad slave-ship revolt of 1839. Hottentot Venus: A Novel explores the life of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited naked in freak shows in 19th-century Europe.
In 1994, Chase-Riboud published The President's Daughter, a work that continues the Sally Hemings story, by imagining the life of her and Jefferson's mixed-race daughter Harriet Hemings; she and all the children were seven-eighths European or white by ancestry. At the age of 21, Harriet left Monticello, given traveling money by Jefferson via his overseer, and went North. She settled in Washington, D.C., where her brother Beverley had already settled. Like him, she passed into white society. She married a white man, according to her letters to her brother Madison Hemings. Madison was the only one of the four surviving Hemings children who lived the remainder of his life identifying as African-American. After moving from Ohio to Wisconsin in 1852, Eston Hemings and his family took the surname "Jefferson" and passed into white society.