This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A sculptor and writer, Barbara Chase-Riboud is known for her African- inspired abstract sculptures that combine polished bronze with fiber. She is regarded as one of the new generation of black artists because of her extensive formal education and extensive travel. She was one of the first women to travel into the People's Republic of China and later established residency in Italy and France as well as New York City.
She was born to a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and her amateur artist father encouraged her talent including her enrollment in Fletcher Art School at the age of seven. She received a BFA and PhD from Temple University in Philadelphia and an MFA from Yale University, where she, the only black woman at the school, studied with Josef Albers.
During her time at Yale, she earned a John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship to study in Rome. During her travels, she was left stranded in Egypt and taken into the home of an black-American cultural attache in Cairo, and she lived with that family for three months. There for the first time she saw non-western art and was so impressed with the elegance and perfection of Egyptian fine art that it determined her future art work of thin, linear bronzes. Many of her pieces have the obvious influence of African masks.
After her graduation in 1960 from Yale, she lived primarily in Paris and married the French journalist-photographer Marc Riboud. They traveled widely in Asia and Africa, and from those travels, her sculpture shows the influence of African and Oceanic art with wooden masks and hanging soft fibers, covering the face of the subject. Many of these pieces are symbolic of the lives of people who are black in that they have a beautiful exterior but underneath feel complicated and threatened. They also address the continuous relationship between men and women of soft flowing forms of masculinity and soft feminine fibers.
Chase-Ribaud has lectured extensively on fine art for the U. S. State Department in Africa and other foreign countries and has had numerous individual shows including at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.
Source: "American Women Artists" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein |
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Barbara Chase-Riboud is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Black American Artists
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