September
14, 2013 - January 20, 2014
2600
Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia,
PA
From
the Philadelphia Museum of Art website:
Bringing
together more than forty works from the United States and Europe, this
exhibition examines Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily
on her important Malcolm X sculptures. Five works from that
series—among them the Museum’s Malcolm X #3 of 1969—and five
closely related sculptures are included. A group of drawings from the late
1960s and early 1970s made during the development of the Malcolm X series
and roughly twenty of the artist’s Monument Drawings from
1996–97 are also on view.
Chase-Riboud
conceived the first Malcolm X in early 1969 while in Paris,
where she moved in late 1960 after completing a graduate degree in architecture
at Yale University. Abstract sculptures that combine cast bronze with wrapped
skeins of silk and wool, these wholly unique, over life-size works capture a
single moment in an endless cycle of transformation. Harmonizing various
contradictory associations, they combine the vertical and horizontal, mineral
and organic, male and female, heavy and light, rigid and supple.
Chase-Riboud
has gracefully fused the elements of armor and textiles in her abstract steles
created in homage to Malcolm X, breaking from the traditional depiction of the
figure in post-World War II European art. Through their complex materiality,
the sculptures also allude to her artistic, cultural, and political experiences
in North Africa and China, while in the context of the American Civil Rights
Movement they stand as powerful beacons to the possibility of cultural
integration that modern art represents. Her exquisite charcoal drawings show an
equally sensitive union of diverse references, textures, and forms.
Born
in Philadelphia and educated at the Philadelphia High School for Girls and the
Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Chase-Riboud now lives in Paris and
Rome. She is both an internationally acclaimed visual artist and an
award-winning writer and poet, best known for her 1979 historical novel Sally
Hemings. Currently she is preparing two anthologies of her poetry and
collected letters for publication.
Sponsors
The
exhibition is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts.
Curators
Carlos
Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art, and
John Vick, Exhibition Assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art
Location
Gallery
172 and Alter Gallery 176, first floor
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