Barbara Chase-Riboud
b. 1939, Philadelphia
Lives in Paris and Rome
venue
Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University
Woldenberg Art Center #202, Newcomb Circle, New Orleans, LA 70118
Monday, closed
Tuesday–Friday, 10 AM–5 PM
Saturday–Sunday, 10 AM–4 PM
neighborhood
About the project
This installation presents a selection of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s sculptures and related investigatory drawings that explore alternatives to traditional Western monuments and memorials. Combining metal and textile through undulating bronze tops and weighty silk bases, Chase-Riboud challenges the nature of the hard and soft materials that make up her work. Named in honor of revolutionary figures, from Malcolm X to Mao Zedong, the works propose new ways that we might conceptualize memorials through subject as much as form, through the expressively sculpted armor-like bronze and knotted and twisted silk. Meanwhile her drawings, which include text and imagery that both mimic and depart from her three-dimensional work, offer insight into her process and the ideas that inform her sculptures.
ABout the artist
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, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photos: Alex Marks