Chronology*
1939
Barbara Dewayne Chase is born in Philadelphia on June 26, the only child of Vivian May Braithwaite West of Montreal and Charles Edward Chase of Philadelphia. Throughout her early life, she will live with her parents and her paternal grandparents, James and Elizabeth Margaret Saunders.
1940s
Attends Norris S. Barratt Middle School, near the family’s South Philadelphia home, but is suspended after being falsely accused of plagiarism for her poem “Autumn Leaves.” Her mother, who witnessed the writing of the poem, removes her from school and has her tutored privately.
Takes art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial.
1948
Enrolls at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, then located in downtown Philadelphia.
1952
Graduates from high school summa cum laude. Her text “Of Understanding” is read at commencement.
Begins classes that fall at Temple University’s Tyler School of Fine Arts in nearby Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, studying with Boris Blai. She is instructed in sculpture, painting, graphic design, printmaking, color theory, and restoration, and in anatomical drawing at the Temple University School of Medicine.
1954
Exhibits prints at ACA Galleries in New York.
1955
The artist’s woodcut titled Reba is purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the exhibition It’s All Yours, sponsored by the magazine Seventeen and on view at the Carnegie Hall Gallery.
Wins a place in the exhibition Best of Philadelphia Art, which tours universities and museums throughout North America and Europe.
1956
Graduates from Tyler with a bachelor of fine arts degree. Fourteen of her woodcuts are reproduced in the Temple University yearbook Templar.
1957
Wins a Mademoiselle guest-editorship award and moves to New York, taking a job with Charm magazine. On the recommendation of art director Leo Lionni, she wins a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome.
Late September, departs New York aboard the French Line ship Flandre, en route to Le Havre. Visits Paris before continuing on to Rome.
December 31, departs Italy by ship for Alexandria and a tour of Egypt.
1958
Returns to Rome from Egypt by way of Athens, Delphi, and Istanbul. Meets Ralph Ellison at the American Academy and Ezra Pound in Rome.
In April, a photograph of Chase-Riboud on the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome appears on the cover of Ebony magazine.
Creates her first bronze sculptures through the direct lost wax method, a casting technique that will become a hallmark of her creative process nearly a decade later. Her work is included that June in the first annual Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Ben Shahn purchases her sculpture Last Supper.
Works that summer at the Cinecitta film studio in Rome as an extra in a number of movies, including Ben-Hur. Returns to the United States that fall to begin a graduate program at the Yale University School of Design and Architecture.
Her bronze sculpture Bullfighter is included in the 1958 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute.
1959
Encounters architect James Stirling at Yale. He proposes and she promises to join him in London after graduation.
1960
Completes her first public commission, the Wheaton Plaza Fountain, in Wheaton, Maryland. No longer extant, this pressed-aluminum fountain deployed a vocabulary of abstract shapes repeating across a vertical screen and produced sound and light effects combined with cascading water. As the fountain was completed without Yale faculty supervision, it did not qualify as a thesis project.
With a book of engravings illustrating Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell as her thesis, she completes graduate studies at Yale, receiving a master of fine arts degree.
Finally joins Stirling in June, then in December, as their marriage plans dissolve, Chase-Riboud goes to Paris, where she is hired as art director for the New York Times International.
1961
Now living in Paris, she meets Marc Eugene Riboud, a photographer with Magnum Photo. They marry on Christmas Day at a church in a hillside village a few miles from Yale schoolmate Sheila Hicks’s ranch in Taxco el Viejo, Mexico.
This year, Chase-Riboud meets artists Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning; and writers Henry Miller, Mary McCarthy, Han Suyin, James Baldwin, James Jones, and Jean Chalon.
1962
Establishes a studio at 48 rue Blomet, a street famous in the 1920s for the Bal Negre where Josephine Baker performed.
1963
September 22, departs for the Soviet Union where Marc Riboud is on assignment to photograph dissident artists, poets, and writers including Yevtushenko and Akhmatova.
1964
The Ribouds purchase La Chenillere, a country home in Pontlevoy, France. Their neighbors include artist Alexander Calder, photographer William Klein, and Pierre and Nicole Salinger.
February 23, her first son, David Charles Riboud, is born.
1965
In April, travels to the People’s Republic of China with Marc Riboud, who is there taking photographs. Chase-Riboud is one of the first American women to visit since the country’s political revolution. She meets the Minister of Culture and attends a state dinner of 5,000 people with Mao.
Returns to the studio, making new sculptures that will be cast that winter by the Fonderia Bonvicini in Verona. It is around this time and during such visits to the Bonvicini foundry that she begins to experiment with sculptures made from thin sheets of folded wax, laying the groundwork for a focused, more ambitious development of the method some two years later.
1966
Receives a sculpture commission from fashion designer Pierre Cardin, creating two abstract suits of armor for his building on the Champs-Elysees.
Late April, travels to Dakar, Senegal, for the first World Festival of Negro Aits, where her sculptures Figure Volante and The Centurion are on view in the exhibition Ten Negro Artists from the United States.
In November, the exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Dessins et sculptures, couples mythologiques opens at the Galerie Cadran Solaire, Paris. Her first major gallery show, it includes surrealist sculptures made of plaster, bone, and other found objects, some cast in bronze. She also exhibits drawings from the Le Lit series, in which rumpled sheets and attenuated, faceless figures hint at metaphysical inscapes.
1967
October 21, at a major demonstration in Washington to end the Vietnam War, Marc Riboud takes his iconic photograph of a young woman with a flower standing before a line of armed soldiers. Hours later in Paris, on October 22, Chase-Riboud gives birth to her second son, Alexei Karol Riboud.
1968
Returns to making sculptures, dedicating herself wholly to the modification of large sheets of wax, which she folds, cuts, and fuses together to create abstract compositions. These waxes, later cast in bronze or aluminum, mark the beginning of an entirely new sculptural practice.
Meets Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Fangois Cachin, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, James Johnson Sweeney, and William and Noma Copley.
1969
Travels in January to London to cast sculptures at the Royal College of Art. Later that month, leaves her Paris studio on the rue Blomet for a larger one on the rue Dutot.
The exhibition 7 americains de Paris at the Galerie Air France in New York features five works by Chase-Riboud, including Malcolm X #1.
Gallery owner Bertha Schaefer visits Chase-Riboud in France and purchases a sculpture. They plan the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York the following February.
Begins waxes for three new sculptures in what will become the Malcolm X series.
In July, with her new sculptures not yet complete, Chase-Riboud travels to Algiers for the first Pan-African Cultural Festival—a summit of politics, art, dance, film, music, and theater. There she meets Angela Davis and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, and she decides to integrate fiber into the three unfinished Malcolm X works.
Returns to France at the end of July and begins designing the wool and silk elements for these sculptures, thereby decisively redefining her approach to materials and compositional strategies.
1970
The Malcolm X series is shown at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, with thirteen additional bronze and aluminum sculptures and sixteen pieces of silver jewelry. Hilton Kramer’s review of the exhibition and of a concurrent presentation of Romare Bearden’s work at Cordier & Ekstrom sparks controversy concerning aesthetics, craftsmanship, and expression in the work of African American contemporary artists.
The solo show Monuments to Malcolm Xis held at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
The Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, begins representing Chase-Riboud, and her work is included in a group show with Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Hedda Sterne, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Her work The Ultimate Ground is included in the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture. Her inclusion follows major protests by the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee, among other groups, for equal representation of male and female artists. Chase-Riboud is one of the first African American women to show at the museum.
1971
Malcolm X #3 appears in the exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum.
The Newark Museum, New Jersey, presents Malcolm X #2 in the exhibition Black Artists: Two Generations and acquires the sculpture.
Five, a documentary about contemporary African American artists, premiers at the Museum of Modern Art. It features Chase-Riboud, Charles White, Betty Blayton, Richard Hunt, and Romare Bearden. The segment on Chase-Riboud begins with installation views of her works in the December 1970 group show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and continues with scenes shot by Rene Burri in late December 1970 featuring the artist in Paris visiting the Bronzalumax Foundry and working in her studio.
Exhibits in Paris at the twenty-third annual Salon de la jeune sculpture at the Musee National d’Art Moderne, and at the twenty-fifth annual Salon des Realites Nouvellesat the Parc Floral.
Exhibits in Jewelry ‘71: An Exhibition of Contemporary Jewelry at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
1972
Solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Meets Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Friedrich Heckmanns.
Zanzibar/Gold (1972) appears on the cover of the April issue of Craft Horizons.
The Museum of Modern Art acquires two untitled drawings. One dates from 1966, the period of the Le Lit series; the other dates from 1971 and represents an invented landscape of piled stones that seep watery skeins of fiber cords.
1973
The exhibition Chase-Riboud, organized by Peter Selz, is mounted at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California. The sculpture Confessions for Myself (1972) is acquired for the museum’s collection, and the show later travels to the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Exhibits contemporary jewelry at the Leslie Rankow Gallery, New York.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquires an untitled 1972 drawing by the artist.
Creates Cape, also known as Cleopatra’s Cape, an armor-like sculpture composed of numerous bronze tiles interconnected with wire, inspired by the ancient jade burial suits of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, which were excavated in China in 1968 and later photographed by Marc Riboud. She also creates Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract, combining sculptural elements, drawings, and handwritten script.
Exhibits with Antonio Calderara at the Merian Gallery in Krefeld, Germany, which also presents Chase-Riboud’s work at Art Cologne.
Exhibits in Jewelry as Sculpture as Jewelry at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
1974
Chase-Riboud’s first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking, is edited by Toni Morrison and published by Random House to critical acclaim.
Exhibits in two group shows: FOCUS: Women’s Work—American Art in 1974 at the Museum of the Civic Center, Philadelphia, and Masterworks of the Seventies at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
In summer, visits Jacqueline Onassis on the Greek Island of Skorpios, where they discuss Chase-Riboud’s plans to write the historical novel Sally Hemings.
In fall, she has a solo exhibition at Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which later travels to the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Malcolm X #1 and Malcolm X #4 are acquired by private collectors in Germany.
Lectures at the Aspen Institute in Berlin and visits East Germany.
1975
Exhibits at the Betty Parsons Gallery in Feburary, then leaves for a month-long lecture and exhibition tour of Africa organized by the U.S. State Department, with venues in Tunisia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Senegal.
Exhibits in the group show 11 in New York at the Women’s Interart Center, New York.
Her drawings are exhibited at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran.
1976
Solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, and the Musee Reattu, Arles, France.
Zanzibar/Gold is acquired by the National Collections of France.
1977
Four drawings exhibited in Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany.
Exhibits in three group shows: The Object as Poet at the Renwick Gallery of the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Washington, DC, which will travel to the American Craft Museum, New York; European Drawings, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, which will travel to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Les Mains Regardent at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
1979
Working with Jacqueline Onassis, then an acquiring editor at Viking Press, Chase-Riboud publishes the historical novel Sally Hemings, which wins the Kafka Prize in Fiction by an American Woman. The book becomes an international bestseller and is translated into ten languages. It generates protest among many Jeffersonians, but the story is supported two decades later by genealogical DNA testing.
Exhibits in the 3rd Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue. Participates in two New York group shows: 3 Sculptors: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Melvin Edwards & Richard Hunt at the Bronx Museum, and Another Generation at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
1980
Exhibits in the group show Afro-American Abstraction at P.S.1 in New York, which later travels to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
In April, two scale models of works from the Malcolm X series are included in a group show at the Galerie Le Miroir d’Encre, Brussels.
Divorces Marc Riboud.
1981
Receives an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Temple University.
Forever Free: Ait by African-American Women, 1862-1980 opens at Illinois State University’s Center for the Visual Arts Gallery. The exhibition includes Chase-Riboud’s Confessions for Myself and travels to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama; the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina; the University of Maryland Art Gallery; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
In New York Chase-Riboud renews her acquaintance with Sergio Tosi, an Italian publisher of art catalogues and artist books and multiples. She exhibits drawings at his Stampatori Gallery in New York, and they marry later that year. Back in Paris, she meets artists Pol Bury, Pierre Alechinsky, Jean-Michel Folon, and Cesar, as well as Alexina “Teeny” Duchamp and Peter and Jacqueline Matisse.
1983
Exhibits in N&uds et Ligatures at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris.
1984
Creates the bronze and wood sculpture Cleopatra’s Door, a theme to which she will return with a series of sculptures in the mid-1990s.
Exhibits in East-West: Contemporary American Art at the California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles.
1985
Establishes a studio in the Palazzo Ricci, Rome, where she is neighbors with Cy Twombly.
1986
Publishes Valide: A Novel of the Harem with William Morrow, who will release Chase-Riboud’s other fiction and poetry in the 1980s.
1988
Publishes the book of poetry Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra and wins the Carl Sandburg Award for best American poet. A selection of poems from this book is later set to music by composer Andy Vores and first performed in 1990 by soprano Dominique Labelle.
1989
Publishes Echo of Lions: A Novel of the Amistad, a story based on the only successful slave revolt. The book goes on to be widely translated.
1990
Exhibits at the Pasadena City College in California, coinciding with her participation in the school’s fourth annual Artists in Residence program. She donates her sculpture Isis (1989) to the school’s permanent collection.
Begins the La Musica series, which she will develop throughout the next two decades. As part of this series she conceives of a monument to Marian Anderson in red patinated bronze to be erected on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.
1991
Death of her mother, Vivian May Braithwaite West.
1992
Her sculpture All That Rises Must Converge/Gold (1973) is acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Chase-Riboud meets the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello, and curator William Lieberman, who acquired the woodcut Reba for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.
Exhibits in Paris Connections at the Bomani Gallery, San Francisco.
1993
Receives honorary Doctorate of Letters from Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Begins making the “shelf sculptures,” which follow Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract in their combination of sculptural elements, drawing, and writing.
1994
Publishes Roman Egyptien (Editions du Felin) and The President’s Daughter (Crown Publishers), which continues the Sally Hemings story.
Lectures at the William Faulkner Festival in Rennes, France.
Chase-Riboud submits a proposal to the White House for a Middle Passage Monument to commemorate the “11 million African victims on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean who perished there through torture, disease, bestial confinement, inhumane treatment, and suicide, which occurred as a result of their enforced deportation into slavery.” The proposal includes a call for a proclamation of apology on behalf of the American people to their co-citizens for “the crime of slavery perpetrated upon their ancestors by the United States.”
Creates Tantra #/. Two more works in the series will follow in 1997 and 1998.
1995
Produces the lithograph Akhmatova’s Monument at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, and is honored with the James Van Der Zee Award, now the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award.
Receives a commission from the U.S. General Services Administration to create the sculpture Africa Rising to commemorate the recently discovered African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, a colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans.
Exhibits in the Fujisankei Biennale International Exhibition for Contemporary Sculpture at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan.
Exhibits in the group show The Listening Sky: Inaugural Exhibition of the Studio Museum in Harlem Sculpture Garden.
1996
Chase-Riboud is knighted by the French government as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Receives an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Connecticut.
Begins the Monument Drawings, executed in charcoal and ink on identical etchings, completing twenty-four by the following year. The series recalls the imagery of her 1970s drawings, as well as the strategy, established with the Malcolm X sculptures, of producing nonrepresentative commemorative works. Each drawing is dedicated to an individual or event and most are given a relevant geographic location, echoing the artist’s concurrent work on Africa Rising as well as her historical novels.
Exhibits in Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition will later travel to the Chicago Cultural Center, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum.
Exhibits in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, organized by the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. The exhibition will travel to six more American venues over the next three years.
Malcolm X #3 is included in Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Center Museum, Philadelphia (now the African American Museum in Philadelphia). The exhibition will travel to six more American venues over the next two years.
1998
Exhibits at the Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans. Her sculpture Plant Lady is acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Monument Drawings opens at the St. John’s Museum of Art, in Wilmington, North Carolina (now the Cameron Art Museum). It will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999, and the following year to the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, where the artist will deliver the Annual Theodore L. Low Lecture.
In spring and summer she exhibits at Bianca Pila Contemporary Art, Chicago.
The bronze memorial Africa Rising, commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration, is installed in the lobby of the Ted Weiss Federal Building, adjacent to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.
1999
Peter Selz and Anthony F. Janson complete the monographic study Barbara Chase-Riboud :Sculptor, published by Harry N. Abrams.
2000
Solo Exhibition at Moeller Fine Art, New York.
2001
Malcolm X #3 is acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and exhibited the following year in Gifts in Honor of the 125th Anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract is exhibited at the British Museum, London, in Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth.
2002
Exhibits at the G. R. N’Namdi Galleries in Detroit and Chicago.
2003
Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud’s historical novel about Sarah Baartman, is published by Doubleday. The book is nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and wins the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for Fiction.
Creates four new sculptures in the Malcolm X series.
2004
Solo exhibition at the Galleria Giulia, Rome.
2006
Noel Art Liason, Inc., begins to represent Chase-Riboud. The Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, Michigan, acquires Malcolm X #6 and will acquire Malcolm X #8 the following year.
Exhibits in two group shows: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 19641980 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery at the New York Historical Society Museum, which will later purchase Sojourner Truth Monument Maquette (1999) and Scale Model Monument/Andrew Green, Father of Greater New York (2007).
2007
Receives the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association in New York.
Receives the Alain Locke Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit Institute of Art.
Returns to China to complete work on a travelogue of her 1965 trip, titled 10,000 Kilometers of Silk.
Begins five new Malcolm X sculptures, which she will finish the next year, bringing the total number of works in the series to thirteen. She also creates Tantra #4, All That Rises Must Converge /Red, and Anne d’H, among other works.
2008
Composer Leslie Savoy Burrs creates a jazz opera based on Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra.
Solo exhibition of sculpture at the Galleria Giulia, Rome.
Exhibits in [un]common threads at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
Starts organizing her collected letters to her mother, which begin at the outset of her first trip to Europe in 1957 and end in 1991 with her mother’s death.
Birth of granddaughter Mathilde Rose Riboud.
2009
Johns Hopkins University Press publishes a special issue of Callaloo devoted to the artist.
2011
Completes an English version of Roman Egyptien called Alexandrian Bodies, and the historical novel The Great Mrs. Elias.
Birth of grandson Jules Dewayne de Bilancourt Riboud.
2012
Malcolm X #11 (2008) is included in The Annual: 2012 at the National Academy Museum, New York.
Receives the Outstanding Woman of the Year Award from the American Biographical Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina.
2013
Completes four literary works: Helicopter, a verse novel; Letters to My Mother from an American in Paris: A Memoir; Pannonica & Theolonius; and Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released: Collected Poems.
In September, Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles, a survey of the iconic sculptures and related works, opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The following winter it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Donates the sculpture Anne d’H (2008) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a gift in memory of the Museum’s late director, Anne d’Harnoncourt.
2014
Malcolm X #2 is included in the exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Emory University acquires part of Chase-Riboud’s archive, including her correspondence and six original manuscripts.
Chase-Riboud, Charles Gaines, and Paul Carter Harrison unite for a symposium on art with Carrie Mae Weems at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
* Adapted, with permission, from John Vick, “Chronology,” in Carlos Basualdo, ed., Barbara Chase-Riboud: The “Malcolm X” Steles, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013), pp. 109–19; © Philadelphia Museum of Art.