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Barbara Chase-Riboud
born Philadelphia, PA 1939
BornPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
BiographyBarbara Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia and now lives and works between Paris, Rome, and Milan. She earned her BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and her MFA at Yale University School of Design and Architecture. In the late 1950s, she developed her own innovation on the centuries-old process of direct lost-wax casting, producing distinctive hybrid works of cast metal combined with silk and other fibers, in sculptures of beauty and tension. Chase-Riboud’s practice is deeply grounded in history; her memorials and monuments, particularly the series commemorating Malcolm X, are among her best-known works. Chase-Riboud is also known for her writing, most notably the novel Sally Hemings (Viking Press, 1979), presciently imagining the life of the enslaved woman who bore children by Thomas Jefferson. “When it works . . ., the tension and opposition between the two materials transfer some of the aspects of one to the other—metal becomes soft and silk becomes hard, . . ., to form a unity of opposites. . . . It is no longer simply a piece of sculpture, but a personage: an object of ritual and magic.”
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