Retrospective: Reflections on Barbara Chase-Riboud (2008)

In March 1972, I picked up the new copy of Art News and saw the review of Barbara Chase-Riboud's show at the celebrated Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. The reproduction of Why Did We Leave Zanzibar (1971) immediately caught my eye. I had become tired of what was considered the mainstream in sculpture, all these depersonalized fabricated cubes taking space in gallery floors. Here was an authentic highly personal statement, sculpture of inherent mystery and beauty. The fact that Chase-Riboud had been living in Paris for a long time and was influenced by Germaine Richier and Giacometti—artists whose sculpture I had long admired and included in the New Images of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—may have predisposed my response to her work. By sheer coincidence Barbara walked into my office at the Berkeley Museum the next day, saying that her work would look great in the new building. I could only agree. Consulting with the Committee for the Acquisition of Afro-American Art (the only such group in the country), we commissioned her to make a large piece in metal fiber. The result was the powerful Confessions to Myself (1972) in black bronze and black wool. Over three meters tall, it was the largest work she had made until this time. Anthony F. Janson calls it "her most celebrated work" (89); regrettably, the Berkeley Museum has not exhibited it for many years. The sculptor made it directly in the foundry, a process that became her way of working from that point.

A few months later in January 1973, the show of ten sculptures and eleven drawings opened with a fine small catalogue that compromised essays by Francoise Nora-Cachin, Curator at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris; Genevieve Monnier, Curator in the Drawing Department of the Louvre; and Dr. Friedrich W. Heckmanns of the Kunst-museum in Düsseldorf. This was the first exhibition of an African American woman and has thus been noted as a landmark in the Civil Rights/Women's Rights struggle.

Soon after the show closed in Berkeley, the Detroit Art Institute mounted a solo show of her work, followed by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris and solo shows in African nations, Iran etc. In 1999, Harry Abrams published the Barbara Chase-Riboud monograph with essays by myself and Anthony F. Janson, which coincided with the Metropolitan Museum exhibition of her drawings that prompted both Bill Lieberman, the curator of 20^th Century Art, and Phillipe de Montebello, the director, to tell her how pleased they were to have this fine exhibition. In 1996, she had been appointed Chevalier d'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. In 2007, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association and the Alain Locke International Achievement Award from the Detroit Art Institute. I must say that I was happy to have my initial response to her work confirmed internationally. A solo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the city where she was born, was scheduled for 2008.

Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculpture during the last dozen years has been mostly in the realm of refinement and completion. Often her work was done over long periods of time—started, then picked up later. There is The Well of the Concubine Pearl (1973-2003), beginning with her poem of that title in 1996, which fused the sensual with the spiritual: "Love rustles like gray silk in the palace" and concludes, "And the eye of the world is in the Well of the Precious Concubine Pearl." Then, in 1973 she cast the aluminum sculpted rod. In 1997 she made a series of drawings for a monument by that name and, finally, in 2003 she completed the present columnar work: elegant, tall and slender with a link chain, embedded in the metal and silk fabric, knotted, braided and looped, cascading downward. Following a similar trajectory there is Nursery #2 (2003), which goes back to a similar work of 1989. The piece was supposed to be...