Barbara Chase-Riboud, La Musica Red #4, 2003, Bronze with red patina and silk, 30 x 15 x 32 inches, signed. Image via michaelrosenfeldart.com. |
One
Million Kilometers of Silk
October 31, 2014 – January 10, 2015
100
Eleventh Avenue at 19th Street
New York,
NY
From
michaelrosenfeldart.com:
“I love
silk, and it's one of the strongest materials in the world and lasts as long as
the bronze. So it's not a weak material
vs. a strong material so the transformation that happens in the steles is not
between two unequal things but two equal things that interact and transform
each other."
—Barbara
Chase-Riboud
Michael
Rosenfeld Gallery proudly announces its representation of Barbara Chase-Riboud, the American-born,
European-based author, poet, and artist whose work in all genres engages with
the processes of transformation. To mark this occasion, the gallery has mounted
Barbara Chase-Riboud: One Million
Kilometers of Silk an exhibition of sculptures and drawings.
Born in
1939 in Philadelphia, Barbara Chase-Riboud began taking art classes at the Philadelphia
Art Museum at an early age. When she was in elementary school, her talent for
poetry was so strong that a teacher accused her of plagiarizing a poem, “Autumn
Leaves.” In response to the accusation, her mother, who had watched her compose
the poem, pulled Chase-Riboud out of school, and had her tutored at home before
enrolling her in the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948. Four years
later, Chase-Riboud graduated from high school and began studying at Temple
University’s Tyler School of Art. The Museum of Modern Art purchased her
woodcut Reba in 1955. The following year, she graduated from Temple, and in
1957, she won a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to study in Rome. She returned to
the United States in September of 1958 with a fellowship to pursue her MFA at
Yale. Soon after, she had a sculpture, Bull-Fighter, included in the 1958
Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at
the Carnegie Mellon Institute. In 1960, the twenty-one-year-old artist
completed her first commissioned public work, the Wheaton Plaza Fountain, in
Maryland (destroyed) and received her MFA from Yale.
In the
mid-1960s, Chase-Riboud moved to Europe, settling in France. She would make
Europe her permanent home, dividing her time between France and Italy. She
began creating thin sheets of wax that she could bend, fold, meld, or sever in
order to create unique models, which she would then bring to a local foundry
for casting. This new approach to the lost-wax casting process enabled her to produce
large-scale sculptures comprised of ribbons of bronze and aluminum. In 1969,
she added fiber to these metal elements, devising the seemingly paradoxical
works for which she became famous—tall, sturdy sculptures of cast metal resting
on supports hidden by cascading skeins of silk or wool so that the fibers seem
to support the metal. Of these works were a group of steles memorializing
Malcolm X and his transformation “from a convict to a world leader.” Known
collectively as the Malcolm X Steles, these works were recently exhibited to
acclaim at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum
(University of California Berkeley). In 2007, Chase-Riboud returned to the
subject of Malcolm X, producing another series of tall metal-and-fiber sculptures
that bore his name. Several of these works will be on view as part of the
exhibition at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
By the
1970s, Barbara Chase-Riboud was celebrated for her sculpture and well known to
Europeans as a gifted visual artist. However, despite the fact that her work
was exhibited at prominent modern art museums on the East and West Coasts in
the 1970s, she was better known for her literary talents in the United States.
In 1974, Chase-Riboud published her first book of poetry. Five years later, her
first novel, Sally Hemings (Viking
Press, 1979), won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Best Novel by an American
Woman. The book, about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave
Sally Hemings, became an international bestseller. Its sequel, The President’s Daughter, was published
by Ballentine Books in 1994. Other literary works include Echo of Lions (1989, William Morrow), about the Amistad revolt, and
Hottentot Venus (Doubleday, 2003),
about Sarah Baartman. This year, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s papers and manuscripts
will join those of other celebrated authors at Emory University’s Manuscript
and Rare Book Library. The acquisition will be announced at The Callaloo Conference, where
Chase-Riboud will also be the closing keynote speaker.
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