Barbara Chase-Riboud

Born in Philadelphia in 1939, for over six decades Barbara Chase-Riboud 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/three-dimensional, Western/non-Western, stable/ fluid, figurative/abstract, powerful/delicate, brutal/beautiful, violence/harmony. Since 1958 her sculptures, drawings and writings which often monumentalize “the invisibles of history” have been presented at public and private institutions around the world.

In 1960 Barbara Chase-Riboud became the first Black woman graduate from the MFA from the Yale School of Design and Architecture. Later that year, Chase-Riboud moved to London and then France where she has lived since. In 1967, she added fiber to these aluminum and bronze 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.

In 1995 Chase-Riboud won a commission from the US General Services Administration to create Africa Rising, commemorating the recently discovered African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, a colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans. In 1998 Africa Rising was installed in the lobby of the Ted Weiss Federal Building, adjacent to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, where it remains. Chase-Riboud describes Africa Rising as “an ark of collective history, a vessel of contemplation afloat on an ocean of time and space.” The monument is a culmination of Chase-Riboud’s deep engagement with history, literature, poetry, and sculpture. The figure’s posture echoes that of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which is located in the Louvre.

Equally renowned for her literary success, Chase-Riboud has published books of poetry and historical novels including: From Memphis & Peking; Sally Hemings; The President’s Daughter; Valide: A Novel of the Harem; Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra; Echo of Lions: A Novel of the Amistad; Roman Égyptien; Hottentot Venus; Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God Is Released: Collected and New Poems, 1974-2011, and The Great Mrs. Elias. In October 2022 her memoir I Always Knew was published by Princeton University Press. In November 2025 her poem Helicopter was published by the American Academy in Rome in the US in a special limited edition.

In 2024 Barbara Chase-Riboud's singular sculptures were presented "Quand Une Noeud Est Denoue, Une Dieu Est Libere", an exhibition mounted simultaneously in eight prestigious museums across the city of Paris including the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Palais De La Porte D'Oree, Musee Guimet, Musee Du Quai Branly, Philharmonie and Palais De Tokyo.