"Claude Levi-Strauss has stated that 'art is the only proof that anything has ever happened in the past.'This is one of the most provocative--and one of the truest----comments on the role of art I've ever read or heard. Everything else is hearsay."

Over the past three decades, Barbara Chase-Riboud has integrated mediums and materials in uniquely expressive ways to create a remarkable body of literary and visual art. Presented here is the first comprehcnsive survey of the sculptures and drawings of this extraordinary artist.

Barbara Chase-Riboud first captured the attention of the art world in the 1970s with elegant, powerful sculptures in which she merged the hardness of bronze with the lush softness of woven silk and wool. Over the past three decades, she has continued to combine materials and mediums in uniquely expressive ways.Her work is represented in major surveys of Western art and in important private and public collections,including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of the sculptures and drawings of this talented artist.

Two eminent art historians join forces to provide a critical evaluation of Chase-Riboud's thirty years of artistic creativity. First, Peter Selz looks at the development of her sculpture, which incorporates a wide variety of influences, including archaeology,history, spiritualism, and the European Baroque sculptural tradition. Anthony E Janson then builds on these elements in his analysis of Chase-Riboud's drawings, focusing on her recent series of imagined Monuments to great historical and literary figures.

In tracing Chase-Riboud's artistic development,the authors weave in references to her culturally rich childhood in Philadelphia, her early adult years studying design and architecture at Yale, and her extensive travels, ranging from Italy. Greece, Egypt,and Morocco to the Soviet Union and China. This wide experience of the world infuses all of her art, from her sculpture series dedicated to Malcolm X, first exhibited in 1970, to her monumental commissioned work Africa Rising, installed in lower Manhattan as a memorial to the colonial slave-era African burial ground recently uncovered there, and for which the artist received a 1998 design award from the U.S. General Services Administration. Chase-Riboud's dual career as a prizewinning novelist (Sally Hemings, Echo of Lions)and poet (From Memphis & Peking, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra) is evident in the dramatic narrative quality of both her sculptures and drawings.Several of her poems are included here.

The illustrated essays are complemented by special color sections that highlight signature sculptural works,such as Confessions for Myself and the Tantra series; works on paper, including the artist's multimedia "table pieces"; and her masterpiece Africa Rising. The result is a beautiful, fascinating book that vividly illuminates the life and work of an extraordinary artist.

All That Rises

Sculpture    Peter Selz

Cleopatra

The Monument Drawings    Anthony F. Janson

Harrar/Africa Rising

Chronology

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Selected Bibliography

Index

Photograph Credits