"Barbara Chase Riboud" (June 26 1939)Scu

Sculptor,poet,novelist,and painter,was born Barbara Chase in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania,the only daughter of Charles Edward Chase, a contractor,and Vivian May West,a medical technician.She grew up in a nurturing middle-class environment and took dance lessons at the age of five,piano lessons at six, and art lessons at seven.In 1946 she enrolled at the Fletcher Memorial Art School in Philadelphia,where she received her first art prize for creating a small Greek vase.Barbara flourished intellectually and was admitted to the Philadelphia Museum School of art,where she studied dance with Marion Cuyjet,a master ballet teacher.She also attended Philadelphia's Academy of Music. At eleven years old, Barbara began writing poetry and enrolled at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. In 1954 she won the National Scholastic Art Contest.For the first time, she exhibited her prints at the ACA (American Contemporary Artists) Gallery in New York City, and her Woodcut print Reba was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.She graduated from the Philadelphia High School for girls Summer cum laude.In 1954 she enrolled at Tyler School of Fine Arts in Elkins Park,Pennsylvania (affiliated with Temple University),and graduated in 1957.That same year she was the first African American to win Mademoiselle magazine's Guest Editorship Award.One year later Barbara studied at the American Academy in Rome Her stay in Italy gave her the opportunity to participate in the Mainstream of Western Art.During her time in Rome she decided to spend three months traveling and studying art in Egypt, where she became familiar with Egyptian art.Barbara trip to Egypt was pivotal experience and influenced her artistic.In fact, it was the ancient Egyptian ruins that had a major impact on her change of artistic perspective.In 1959 she returned to the united States to attend Yale University,where she studied design and architecture with Joseph Albers, Vincent Scully, Philip Johnson,Louis,Kahn,and Alvin Eisenman.The following year she received her master's degree from Yale and moved to London,where she stayed for a year.In 1961 she Left London, for Paris,where she started working for the New York Times, as a promotional artist director.There she met and married Marc Riboud, a French photographer.The Wedding took place in Mexico at the ranch of Shelia Hicks,the internationally known fiber artist.In 1962 Barbara visited France,Greece,Morocco,and Spain,where she met the artist,Salvador Dali and the writers James Baldwin,Henry Miller,and Jean Chalon.She traveled the following year to the Soviet Union, where she spent some time with dissident painters and discovered the poet Anna Akhmatova During the same year she brought La Chenillere,an eighteenth-century farmhouse at Pontlevoy,in the Loire Valley,France,where she set up her atelier.Barbara then worked in Verona, Italy,where she perfected the technique of making direct cut and folded models from sheet wax.This greatly aided in her skills and style as a sculptor. Her son, David Charles, was born in 1964,and she had a second son, Alexis Karol, in 1967.In 1965 Barbara visited the People's Republic of China,where she met Chou En-lai,had a state dinner with Mao Tse-Tung,and wrote the "Chinese"poems.In 1966 she had her first exhibition in Paris at the Cadran Solaire art gallery.She also exhibited in Dakar,Senegal, at the First African Festival of Arts,where she met President Leopold Senghor.While in Africa she attended the Pan-African Festival in Algiers,where she met Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Panthers.Barbara's travels to Africa and Asia influenced not only her literary career but also her works of art.Her sculptures are a combination of geometric bronze forms and braided silk fibers.Her best-known 1970s sculptures also reflect African Masks.For example her 1972 freestanding sculpture Confessions for myself was made of black bronze and black wool.The hanging braids and fibrous stands allude to the supernatural,the rites and magic of Africa,and other non-Western realities.In parallel,during the same year,she wrote the poem,"Soledad." She exhibited aluminum sculptures at Air France Gallery in New York.Throughout the 1970s her art pieces won several awards, and she exhibited them in museums in the United States and Europe.Barbara subsequently received international recognition for the organic bronze sculptures,made of wax, organic woven fiber, and metal, that she created using propane torch, a hot plate,and carving tools.Barbara began her literary career in 1974 with a book of poetry, edited by Toni Morrison, called From Memphis to Peking.She was the first African American woman to visit China after the revolution,and these poems reflect her previous visit to China as well as her visit to Egypt.Barbara insisted that her writing as well as her visit to Egypt she insisted that her writing was not secondary to her sculpture,but more like a parallel vocation.In an interview about her careers as an artist and a writer, she remarked:"There's something terribly healthy about sculpture.It's very fundamental.You build something.You look at it.It's finished.But a book is never finished.Her next literary work was the novel Sally Hemings (1979),a book that established her as an important writer.The idea for the novel stemmed from her longtime fascination with the story of the slave Sally Hemings,who had a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.The novel expressed Barbara's concerns about the arbitrary racial.