Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud

b. 1939, Philadelphia
lives Paris and Rome

For over five decades Barbara Chase-Riboud has created abstract art with a deep  sense of place, and a nuanced understanding of history and identity. Her celebrated work operates on several dichotomies that have become central to her practice: hard and soft, male and female, flat and three-dimensional, Western and non-Western, stable and fluid, figurative and abstract, powerful and delicate, brutal and beautiful, violence and harmony. In bringing these supposed poles together in her work, Chase-Riboud reveals a kind of hybrid form that is at once singular and multivalent. In 1958, Chase-Riboud developed her own particular innovation on the historical direct lost-wax method of casting bronze sculpture, and in 1967, she added fiber to these metal elements, devising 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 are her best known, a group of twenty black steles memorializing Malcolm X and his life and leadership. 

Chase-Riboud has been the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. Her work has also been exhibited at institutions worldwide. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ministry of Culture, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian African American Museum, Washington, DC; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Chase-Riboud was the first black female to graduate with a MFA from the Yale School of Design and Architecture. 

Barbara Chase-Riboud, Malcolm X #15, 2016. Black bronze, silk, wool, linen, and synthetic fibers, 99 ½ x 36 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist