On Her Own Terms: An Interview with Barbara Chase-Riboud

This interview took place in January 2006, at Barbara Chase-Riboud's home in Paris, France. Follow-ups were conducted via email.

SPENCER:

Would you tell us about your background?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

I'll tell you an anecdote that I begin with. I really can't tell you why I do the things I do or why I've had these two careers. I have to tell you that the literary career came very, very late in life. It's not as if I started out writing, although I did write something when I was eleven years old and I was accused of plagiarism.

SPENCER:

Is that why you stopped writing?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

That's why I stopped. This was when I was eleven, and I didn't go back to writing again until I was in my thirties, late thirties as a matter of fact. The first collection of poems was a collection which spanned maybe six or seven years.

SPENCER:

Did your parents think that the plagiarism accusation was race related?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

It was race related in the fact that the teacher obviously thought that no little black girl was capable of writing this poem about falling leaves and death and what have you.

SPENCER:

Was there poetry and lots of reading in your home?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

There was a lot of reading. I was one of these kids that read under the covers with a flashlight. I read everything that I could find.

SPENCER:

What were some of the things that you read?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

I don't really remember. A lot of romances, a lot of novels. There must have also been some art history books in there. My father was a painter. The way I discovered my father was a painter was that I went down to the cellar one day and I saw all these paintings that I had never before [seen], very beautiful paintings, sort of Manet-like paintings, big landscapes of people working, [paintings] that I never knew existed. What happened was that he wanted to go to architectural school. He wanted to be an architect, and of course he couldn't. He was rejected [because of race], and he couldn't get into architectural school, so he went to work for my grandfather at a construction company as a kind of rag-time architect. That is, somebody else would have to sign his drawings because he didn't have a license.

SPENCER:

Let's talk about your time at Yale for a moment. During your first year as an art student in 1959, you were commissioned to design an art piece, a fountain, for the Wheaton Shopping Plaza in Maryland. It served as a partial portion of your master's thesis. This was quite an extraordinary achievement. How did this project come about?

CHASE-RIBOUD:

I had a friend whom I had met in Rome who had been very influential in getting me into Yale in the first place. She was a landscape architect. She was working in New York, and she called me up one day in New Haven and said that she had this shopping center to design and would I like to do the fountain. I said sure, and I did the scale. It wasn't a submission; it was a commission. I thought it was a pretty good idea for a piece. Then I had to find a factory, and I found an airplane factory to produce it. I had to do all the molds. I had to do the drawing, the molds, and I had to write up the whole thing. I had to over [see] the work, and I had to install it. So I figured that was a pretty good thesis. But I didn't ask anybody permission to do it, and I didn't tell anybody that I was doing it, so what happened with the administration was that at the last minute, two weeks before graduation, they said, "Your thesis, although it's very interesting and it's very good, was not done under...