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Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds at Serpentine North Gallery
Make sure to visit this retrospective of the multidisciplinary artist - now extended to 10th April
January 26, 2023
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
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Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
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Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
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Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
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Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
.%20Credit%20Jo%20Underhill.jpg)
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Gesamtkunstwerk abounds in Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds. The first major solo exhibition of the monumental sculptor, novelist, and poet speaks of her interdisciplinary practice, but shows mainly her sculptural work. It begins with ‘Confessions for Myself’ (1972), which curators Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley call ‘the embodiment of her practice’, with its knotted woollen cords, and incorporation of international cultural objects.
Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to travel to China after the 1949 Revolution. Indeed, hers is a career filled with firsts; the youngest artist ever to be acquired by MoMA, with a woodcut print purchased in 1955, and the first woman of colour to graduate from Yale School of Architecture and Design (now School of Art) in 1960. But she credits her grandmother as her ‘original sculptor’, highlighting a respect for family and women shared with Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.
Sculpting from the age of seven, she turned to wax casting and bronze during her residency at the American University in Rome. During the 1950s and 1960s, she relocated to Europe and Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, all leaders in surrealism.
Alberto Giacometti, whom she met twice, would have the greatest impact on her work, culminating in an exhibition of their Venice series in conversation, a sculptural call and response. But in her early career, as Chase-Riboud moved from representation and figuration to more abstract works, his spindly legs continued to crop up. She first used her sculpture’s structural cords to hide them, and stepped into her most experimental period.
Infinite Folds reveals how her practice inverts – and subverts - our expectations of structures and materials. ‘Where we might think that the bronze would be the sturdier material and the fibre be more fragile…the bronze appears to be held up by the coils of fibre which become rigid, and the bronze appears to flow – become more fluid’.
Material hierarchies are proxies here for social ones. Following ‘Meta Mondrian Monumentale’ (1967), her first public sculpture, the artist would make ‘Africa Rising’ (1998). It was commissioned in 1995 by the US General Services Administration to memorialise the free and enslaved Africans interred in Lower Manhattan, New York City, where it still stands today.
Chase-Riboud represented the US in the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal (1966), and displayed at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). But the artist’s attention on the African diaspora, and the effects of empire and colonialism, accelerated from the 1970s.
Zanzibar, a series of totemic forms, speaks of the centre of the Indian Ocean slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and its underrepresented individual narratives. Her interdisciplinary practice is detailed in poems about Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the US President Thomas Jefferson, and in her memoir, I Always Knew (2022) – neither of which, sadly, are displayed.
Infinite Folds instead focuses on spatial articulations of history and memory, in public monuments and funerary memorials. Memoria, produced in response to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, highlights the immediate and continued impact of the Civil Rights and African independence movements on her life and practice.
Rather than make figurative representations, Chase-Riboud attempts to memorialise the idea of the leader. We see three Malcolms - one gold and tightly wound, two dark and sprawling - sculpted over a span of 48 years, testament to the difficult struggle of ‘physically manifesting his memory’.
The ropes and cords of her sculptures leak into her ink and charcoal drawings, similar monuments to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Chinese Consort Shen. Captions show incorrect birth dates, a minor curatorial error, but one which obscures the artist’s intention to cement figures in history. Even the remark that she ‘started [her] family’ in 1964, and returned to art 1968, evidences the purpose and intent in Chase-Riboud’s practice.
The artist draws on a range of influences from her international travels, but she neither others nor exoticises foreign cultures, instead exposing the power wielded by those typically considered inferior – especially women.
Early on, we see women’s bodies cast in abstract aluminium. The colour red, taken from the tiled roofs and lacquered columns in Beijing’s Forbidden City, is used to articulate the sexual exploitation of Sarah Baartman, an enslaved woman from Southern Africa displayed in London and Paris as a ‘hottentot Venus’.
The artist explores ‘female sexuality’ through sculpture, transforming domestic objects into powerful works. Chase-Riboud’s second poetry book, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987), hails the leader as a modern African queen. Her ‘Wedding Dress’ is more a suit of armour, with thousands (3547, she’s counted) of bronze squares, sewn together with bronze wire.
This monumental work draws from the Han Dynasty shrouds of Prince Liu Sheng and Princess Dou Wan, detailed to her by letter by her-then husband, Marc Riboud, in China. To each square, she adds to the automatic writing of French surrealism – an embodiment of her life’s work, perhaps even more so than ‘Confessions for Myself’.
Infinite Folds concludes in Paris, the city which Chase-Riboud made her home and whose culture she shaped. She perceives her life as a parallel existence to the entertainer Josephine Baker, the first Black woman in a major film, attending both her final performance and funeral.
‘La Musica Josephine Red/Black’ (2021) could be read as another attempt by the artist to prevent a pioneering woman falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘It’s the end of the musical series, and of me!’, an existential remark delivered still with her typical joy and vitality. But here, as the première of her most modern work to date, it speaks to something more forward-facing. It embodies her manifesto for futurism – there too, in print – pushing its viewers out into their next steps too.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds has been extended until 10th April. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
