Exhibits in the 3rd Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue. Participates in two New York group shows: 3 Sculptors: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Melvin Edwards & Richard Hunt at the Bronx Museum, and Another Generation at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
1980
Exhibits in the group show Afro-American Abstraction at P.S.1 in New York, which later travels to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
In April, two scale models of works from the Malcolm X series are included in a group show at the Galerie Le Miroir d’Encre, Brussels.
Divorces Marc Riboud.
1981
Receives an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Temple University.
Forever Free: Ait by African-American Women, 1862-1980 opens at Illinois State University’s Center for the Visual Arts Gallery. The exhibition includes Chase-Riboud’s Confessions for Myself and travels to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama; the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina; the University of Maryland Art Gallery; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
In New York Chase-Riboud renews her acquaintance with Sergio Tosi, an Italian publisher of art catalogues and artist books and multiples. She exhibits drawings at his Stampatori Gallery in New York, and they marry later that year. Back in Paris, she meets artists Pol Bury, Pierre Alechinsky, Jean-Michel Folon, and Cesar, as well as Alexina “Teeny” Duchamp and Peter and Jacqueline Matisse.
1983
Exhibits in N&uds et Ligatures at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris.
1984
Creates the bronze and wood sculpture Cleopatra’s Door, a theme to which she will return with a series of sculptures in the mid-1990s.
Exhibits in East-West: Contemporary American Art at the California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles.
1985
Establishes a studio in the Palazzo Ricci, Rome, where she is neighbors with Cy Twombly.
1986
Publishes Valide: A Novel of the Harem with William Morrow, who will release Chase-Riboud’s other fiction and poetry in the 1980s.
1988
Publishes the book of poetry Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra and wins the Carl Sandburg Award for best American poet. A selection of poems from this book is later set to music by composer Andy Vores and first performed in 1990 by soprano Dominique Labelle.
1989
Publishes Echo of Lions: A Novel of the Amistad, a story based on the only successful slave revolt. The book goes on to be widely translated.
1990
Exhibits at the Pasadena City College in California, coinciding with her participation in the school’s fourth annual Artists in Residence program. She donates her sculpture Isis (1989) to the school’s permanent collection.
Begins the La Musica series, which she will develop throughout the next two decades. As part of this series she conceives of a monument to Marian Anderson in red patinated bronze to be erected on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.
1991
Death of her mother, Vivian May Braithwaite West.
1992
Her sculpture All That Rises Must Converge/Gold (1973) is acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Chase-Riboud meets the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello, and curator William Lieberman, who acquired the woodcut Reba for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.
Exhibits in Paris Connections at the Bomani Gallery, San Francisco.
1993
Receives honorary Doctorate of Letters from Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Begins making the “shelf sculptures,” which follow Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract in their combination of sculptural elements, drawing, and writing.
1994
Publishes Roman Egyptien (Editions du Felin) and The President’s Daughter (Crown Publishers), which continues the Sally Hemings story.
Lectures at the William Faulkner Festival in Rennes, France.
Chase-Riboud submits a proposal to the White House for a Middle Passage Monument to commemorate the “11 million African victims on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean who perished there through torture, disease, bestial confinement, inhumane treatment, and suicide, which occurred as a result of their enforced deportation into slavery.” The proposal includes a call for a proclamation of apology on behalf of the American people to their co-citizens for “the crime of slavery perpetrated upon their ancestors by the United States.”
Creates Tantra #/. Two more works in the series will follow in 1997 and 1998.
1995
Produces the lithograph Akhmatova’s Monument at the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, and is honored with the James Van Der Zee Award, now the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award.
Receives a commission from the U.S. General Services Administration to create the sculpture Africa Rising to commemorate the recently discovered African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, a colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans.
Exhibits in the Fujisankei Biennale International Exhibition for Contemporary Sculpture at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan.
Exhibits in the group show The Listening Sky: Inaugural Exhibition of the Studio Museum in Harlem Sculpture Garden.
1996
Chase-Riboud is knighted by the French government as Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Receives an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Connecticut.
Begins the Monument Drawings, executed in charcoal and ink on identical etchings, completing twenty-four by the following year. The series recalls the imagery of her 1970s drawings, as well as the strategy, established with the Malcolm X sculptures, of producing nonrepresentative commemorative works. Each drawing is dedicated to an individual or event and most are given a relevant geographic location, echoing the artist’s concurrent work on Africa Rising as well as her historical novels.
Exhibits in Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965, organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition will later travel to the Chicago Cultural Center, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum.
Exhibits in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists, organized by the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. The exhibition will travel to six more American venues over the next three years.
Malcolm X #3 is included in Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox, at the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Center Museum, Philadelphia (now the African American Museum in Philadelphia). The exhibition will travel to six more American venues over the next two years.
1998
Exhibits at the Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans. Her sculpture Plant Lady is acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Monument Drawings opens at the St. John’s Museum of Art, in Wilmington, North Carolina (now the Cameron Art Museum). It will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999, and the following year to the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, where the artist will deliver the Annual Theodore L. Low Lecture.
In spring and summer she exhibits at Bianca Pila Contemporary Art, Chicago.
The bronze memorial Africa Rising, commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration, is installed in the lobby of the Ted Weiss Federal Building, adjacent to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.
1999
Peter Selz and Anthony F. Janson complete the monographic study Barbara Chase-Riboud :Sculptor, published by Harry N. Abrams.
2000
Solo Exhibition at Moeller Fine Art, New York.
2001
Malcolm X #3 is acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and exhibited the following year in Gifts in Honor of the 125th Anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract is exhibited at the British Museum, London, in Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to My
th.
2002
Exhibits at the G. R. N’Namdi Galleries in Detroit and Chicago.
2003
Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud’s historical novel about Sarah Baartman, is published by Doubleday. The book is nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and wins the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for Fiction.
Creates four new sculptures in the Malcolm X series.
2004
Solo exhibition at the Galleria Giulia, Rome.
2006
Noel Art Liason, Inc., begins to represent Chase-Riboud. The Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, Michigan, acquires Malcolm X #6 and will acquire Malcolm X #8 the following year.
Exhibits in two group shows: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 19641980 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery at the New York Historical Society Museum, which will later purchase Sojourner Truth Monument Maquette (1999) and Scale Model Monument/Andrew Green, Father of Greater New York (2007).
2007
Receives the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association in New York.
Receives the Alain Locke Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit Institute of Art.
Returns to China to complete work on a travelogue of her 1965 trip, titled 10,000 Kilometers of Silk.
Begins five new Malcolm X sculptures, which she will finish the next year, bringing the total number of works in the series to thirteen. She also creates Tantra #4, All That Rises Must Converge /Red, and Anne d’H, among other works.
2008
Composer Leslie Savoy Burrs creates a jazz opera based on Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra.
Solo exhibition of sculpture at the Galleria Giulia, Rome.
Exhibits in [un]common threads at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
Starts organizing her collected letters to her mother, which begin at the outset of her first trip to Europe in 1957 and end in 1991 with her mother’s death.
Birth of granddaughter Mathilde Rose Riboud.
2009
Johns Hopkins University Press publishes a special issue of Callaloo devoted to the artist.
2011
Completes an English version of Roman Egyptien called Alexandrian Bodies, and the historical novel The Great Mrs. Elias.
Birth of grandson Jules Dewayne de Bilancourt Riboud.
2012
Malcolm X #11 (2008) is included in The Annual: 2012 at the National Academy Museum, New York.
Receives the Outstanding Woman of the Year Award from the American Biographical Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina.
2013
Completes four literary works: Helicopter, a verse novel; Letters to My Mother from an American in Paris: A Memoir; Pannonica & Theolonius; and Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released: Collected Poems.
In September, Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles, a survey of the iconic sculptures and related works, opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The following winter it travels to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Donates the sculpture Anne d’H (2008) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a gift in memory of the Museum’s late director, Anne d’Harnoncourt.
2014
Malcolm X #2 is included in the exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Emory University acquires part of Chase-Riboud’s archive, including her correspondence and six original manuscripts.
Chase-Riboud, Charles Gaines, and Paul Carter Harrison unite for a symposium on art with Carrie Mae Weems at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
* * *
* Adapted, with permission, from John Vick, “Chronology,” in Carlos Basualdo, ed., Barbara Chase-Riboud: The “Malcolm X” Steles, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013), pp. 109–19; © Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Index of first lines
A bunch of slave holders 229
A dog and a cat and a bat and a rat 231
A drawing of the moon 204
A Han princess greets me every morning with 29
A madwoman’s pen chastened 343
A postmark 282
A pyramid, an obelisk 338
A white space 284
Actium blows behind my purple-blazoned sails 97
Afternoon sleep is so different from night’s 94
Ah my darling beloved old man 25
Akhmatova, Akhmatova 332
Alexandria sits cross-legged on the beach 90
An almost-full moon 195
And Calder in Sache 327
And out of love 179
And out of Omega we came 249
And so love passed through a Nude Woman 125
And so Love passed through a Nude Woman 127
Any day now life will 246
Bathers 223
Beat 324
Beneath the weight of angry pride 91
Betrayal is a bitter, bright 100
Body poised 184
Breaking out, pierced like the scent of calamus 114
Breaking out 201
But beware, beloved, Ptolemy women engender violence 84
But only he is initiated 254
Can it be that the world is not flat 171
Chinese chrysanthemums 163
Come 220
Curving like a colorless Vasarely 191
Dark hallooed sister 357
Darling 294
Dawn is cracked 188
Dear 301
Death is not deaf 71
Deep in the folds of a huge and glistening morning 93
Desmond 344
Don’t 199
Dropped 285
ETERNITY PRESSED 166
Euripides Toussaint glided forward 11
Even a heart stop is too far to travel 109
Every life 252
Female, come comfort me 75
Flying 159
Four little brown boys playing in the sun 237
Galileo’s pale hand followed 205
He brought out 242
Heads bent 180
Herons on the roof 299
His phallus in hand 310
How can I wash away the wretchedness 102
“How cruel you are,” you said 86
How do I say 305
How I’d like to be like you 342
How many pebbles on how many beaches have got 66
How many times did I fail to kiss your mouth? 258
I 234
I 281
I 287
I am 337
I am most affected by this spectacle 354
I am the first and the last 256
I awoke in the shaved and sullen heat 279
I claim the beauty of you 280
I dream in your dust, your imprint still in the pillows 78
I fall away from distant stars 122
I gather 187
I have only to reach out from this bed 119
I have seen the pyramids 297
I heard 361
I lit a candle beneath Bernini’s canopy 313
I’m leaving this place 211
I’m leaving this place, cheeks swollen with 123
I picture you with your black Fedora and gold rim glasses 41
I possess a belvedere on Tiberius’ beloved Island 20
I remember 131
I remember a seventeen-year-old girl beaten by biology 336
I remember how once you told me 306
I said I’d never do this 55
I saw a Chinese lady with bound feet in the park 155
I scatter before you like pollen 76
I shall be Venus Genetrix and greet 65
I think about you to the point of tears 351
I thought I might possess the Africa of my dreams 319
I’ve traveled 264
I write in tongues 107
If I could love as I had d
reamed 117
If I long 225
If one sets one’s foot 160
If She is dead, Eros, then kill me 113
If what was written no longer remains 104
In 64
In August 1979, my oak trees fell ill 239
In darkness I lie 181
In Karnak’s shadow 321
In the time a wave recedes to the applause of 95
Jade 174
Leave the door open 27
Let famous voices cease 244
Let me lie down in red 185
Let’s start from the End, not the Beginning 295
Life, or what is left of it, ends 51
Love can die 262
Male, I loved more than life 120
Mao waved to the People 161
Mariane Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa 268
Mathilde ran across the sand 228
Mongolian tradition holds 167
My blood sings through your tuned flesh 69
My darkness covers all your light 73
My imagination honors you 271
My jealousy is a deep Niger-brown, slow-moving silt 88
My lady of testosterone 323
My last word to you is folded lengthwise and knotted 112
My name was Henrietta Lacks 31
My strange savages 399
Now is the time to whisper all the curses that you know 111
O friendly enemy, we have loved 118
O what voices touch what flesh tonight, clarion 398
On a peculiar night 247
On December 19th of the year 2030 307
Once loved woman, Memory has no shame 103
Once upon a time 50
One hundred and ten weeks since 232
One who has loved remembers that he has loved 108
Organdy curtains shifting 193
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 20