Discover the abstract, monumental sculptures of artist Barbara Chase-Riboud. Her works incorporate bronze, paint, and the textile component, wool. Her dynamic bronze, figural works are “flexible as silk.” –their raw beauty is contained yet flowing.
Script: This is Episode 121: Barbara Chase-Riboud: Dichotomies in the Figural Sculpture
Barbara Chase-Riboud is an African-American sculptor from Philadelphia. She works primarily in bronze. Chase-Riboud is also a writer of novels and poetry. She is known for her controversial best-selling book Sally Hemings, an historical novel about Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at his plantation in Monticello.
What initially captured my curiosity about Riboud is her sculpture Confessions for Myself (1972) a figural work infused with autobiographical. This show is a portal to a woman artist—it is an initiation for those who do not know the artist or her work, and if she is familiar to you, my hope is to bring you a fresh perspective of the artist—I note that because Riboud is so prolific and has a long history of practice—this episode can be a springboard for further exploration of this fascinating woman.
Let’s dive into and move around “Confessions for Myself,” this monumental abstract, black bronze work with paint and the textile component wool. It commands presence—it is 10 foot tall, it is described by Janet Koplos “a figure in a cape.” The figural work is composed dominantly of vertical elements of black bronze, at the top they turn to multiple horizontals—the angles of these elemental sheaths suggest shoulder, elbow. From the center of the sculpture the material wool emerges, right from its heart; it is wrapped cords that “sweep down elegantly, while the lower fiber elements are arranged in multiple knots, in passages of thin braids resembling cornrows, and two distinctly brown and nappy loosened braids.” The legs are covered in a “skirt” of the woven strands of wool.
What makes the work so powerful is Riboud’s combination of hard and soft, contained and flowing. Its complexities lie in the textile components of wool and winding cords that emulate its distinctive character.
It is through these elements she interjects the autobiographical—she alludes to her gender, to her race. There is a sense of royalty in the flow of the work—in photographs I viewed, the work is installed in a minimal space, white floors, white walls, lit by overhead track lights–you can see how the effects of light striking the blackness of the bronze, creates highlights of brightness within the dark folds of the bronze. It brings a kind of life to the work.
Chase-Riboud describes her large, hybrid sculptures like Confessions for Myself “as related to architecture. If you look carefully at them, they are big building in one way or another. There is a kind of confessionary aspect to her sculptures, of things that went before and things that went after. The date of the sculpture is 1973 I had already been to the Far East, China, I had already been to India and Egypt, there was already this history of memory. I was in the midst of this big creative change of my work.” Her travel experiences influenced and informed her work. A side note—Riboud’s advice to young artists and writers is “to travel, to open your eyes and see as much as you possibly can.” “Confessions for Myself” led to a series of Malcolm X steles—she created 20, as the artist describes ‘done directly in wax and then cast in bronze. For each sculpture there is only one-an unique cast’
They all have this basic graphic says Riboud—every work is formed one part that is always written, there is the text—it is not imbued in the work, but in the concept of the work—and then there is the sculpture—
In her series celebrating Malcolm X, the African-American human rights activist and popular figure during the Civil Rights movement—he was assassinated in New York in 1965,—monumental abstract sculptures dedicated to his life, a tribute to his legacy, combine “angled bronze forms with bundles of wrapped and knotted fibers—the dominant color is gold. “At the time the artist was in Paris, it was about 1960. Although she was abroad, the events of the Civil Rights movement occurring back home greatly affected Riboud. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 later prompted her to make and dedicate the series in his memory.
Riboud says “Malcolm X became an historical figure, a world figure and these steles are really part of a world tradition of naming steles after historical personages. The power of these objects comes from this kind of juxtaposition of the two materials and how they react one to the other.”
One makes art in order to create beauty. The first object of these sculptures is simply raw beauty and raw power. And the rest, the title, the technique, the intellectualism that goes in and around an art object are secondary to the fact that it exists in space and in time and it will exist beyond your existence.”
The figures in the Malcolm X series are composed and formed through convoluted sheets of cast bronze the artist twists intermingled with malleable braids of silk—this combination has been compared to the works of Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, specifically to the agitation in the drapery in Bernini’s marble works. And indeed this master sculptor was of great importance to Riboud. Bernini’s attitude towards materials “was to have marble made as flexible as wax.” Similarily Riboud made her bronzes flexible as silk. Take a moment to allow this description—she made her bronzes flexible as silk to settle in your mind—it is an example of several dichotomies—contrasts between two things that are being opposed—that have “become central to Riboud’s artistic practice: hard/soft, male/female, flat/three-dimensional, Western/Non-Western, stable/fluid, figurative/abstract, powerful/delicate, brutal/beautiful, violence/harmony—for me it is what makes her works so compelling. (Michael rosenfeldt art)
Riboud also admired Bernini’s interplay of light to imply transitory movement and the immaterial floating quality of his work. One example is Bernini’s great late sculpture of The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1645-52) at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. It is a 16th century Spanish saint being stabbed by an angel with a flaming arrow—its massiveness and grandeur smashes the walls between the physical and the spiritual; the saints spiritual visions and her deep connection with God—Bernini effectively evokes the spiritual, feelings through the material of marble, he “used drapery as abstraction and its surface modeling is a prominent fact in supporting the work’s emotional power.” (amor sciendi)
Let’s look more closely at a couple of individual works within the Malcolm X series,–collectively the fully abstracted sculptures command our attention, they are imbued with emotional power and offer diverse perspectives of Riboud’s expression of Malcolm X –to contemplate them individually deepens our understanding for this iconic figure and Riboud’s interest in civil rights. What we experience is a dialogue of the hard “masculine” bronze with the soft “feminine” through the wool fabric and cords, in some of the figures the wool forms skirts.
Malcolm X #2 is more than six feet high and faces the viewer head-on with its powerful presence consists solely of polished bronze, patinaed into a golden hue, and does not have the fabric used in the other works of the series. Malcolm X 3, the largest of the group, is slender, its cording is silk instead of wool, and both bronze and fiber are again finished in a golden hue. This is also the color of Malcolm X #4, the top is black polished bronze, the lower part consists of heavy wool cord or ribbon also dyed black. Malcolm X #13 has a white signature cord in white silk or as Riboud describes “calligraphy” winds through the black wool fabric.
Riboud’s figures—from the Malcolm X series and in the autobiographical figure “Confessions of Myself,” “details of the interplay of forms in the bronze, the cracks and tears, the openings and closings, the continuous vibrant ripple of the metal achieved by the lost wax process: She accomplishes this through first constructing large thin sheets of wax which are then bent, slashed, and twisted, knotted, pleated, and carved. Wooden copper pins were then used to connect different parts before the wax model was encased in plaster and clay molds to make the negative mold. The molten metal was then poured to melt the wax. After this, the investment mold was broken away and the cooled bronze removed from its casing. As Riboud underscores –Only a single, unique cast can be made by this process”
A fascinating understanding about Riboud’s the trajectory of bronze figures is her progression as an artist from naturalism—she remarked once “all artists start off as figurative. Because the first thing you have to do in life is to learn how to draw figuratively—you have to be able to reproduce reality before you can do anything else” to “when the sculptures themselves became abstracted. She says, They still had legs, and the ropes would cover the legs to eliminate the base and the legs, which made them naturalistic, even surrealistic, but nevertheless—I needed to get rid of the legs. I either had to do that or change my style. I wanted to go completely into abstraction, so I did a whole series of sculptures with bones, which turned out to be totally abstract, but they still had the legs.” Riboud asked the textile artist Sheila Hicks, whom she went to school with, how to hide the legs and move beyond the tyranny of the base—Hicks told her about this card-like wool. Riboud recalls, “She said, “Barbara I’m going to show you one knot, okay? You take it from there, but this is enough for you to make a skirt to hide the bottom of the sculpture.” And it is from this exchange Riboud incorporates fiber and black bronze. Riboud reflects that her “black bronze sculptures suddenly take a life of its own—looming black wool that sort of covers everything up.”
Outside of teaching and creating content for this podcast series, I also write—working on a memoir right now and I also write poetry. I read poetry-including the works of Mary Oliver and Mark Doty-Luis J. Rodriguez, the latter two poets I have met at poetry events—I love this description of what poetry does for the reader. This is from poet Robin Coste Lewis—She says, “People often believe that poetry is about words, But what poetry really is about is the experience that it leaves inside the viewer or the reader. What happens after you hear the poem?” I think this can be applied to looking at art—what happens after you experience an object of art? I believe as Coste-Lewis says“it travels with the viewer through the viewer’s imagination. “ for me it can be a little more dramatic—poetry, art they just don’t travel with me, they sear the landscape of my inner life. I am shifting gears here away from the visual expression because
I was not familiar with Riboud’s works of poetry—and I spent some time with her words. One poem really grabbed me because of the location or setting of the poem—Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is a second home for me. I traveled there a couple of months ago to see the Alice Neel retrospective—and I produced a show focusing on Neel’s pregnant women series—I love the way Riboud expresses her experience of The Met—It is more meaningful given I too have stood outside its monumental grandeur on 5th avenue.
Herons on the Roof—from her book of poems “Everytime a Knot is Undone, A God is Released: Collected and New Poems, 1974-2011
Herons on the Roof-of the Metropolitan Museum-Sleeping one on one, necks tangles-like warring pink serpents-Stark against the gray slate of the terrace-set to fly over Fifth Avenue-against the traffic-place there in climactic peril-a fanatic detrminted to reproduce their-Artificiality in wax rather than nature-Madamme Trussant’s museum-a measure of time’s empiricaly-long after the evident say-two or three or thirteen centuries=flamboyant color of angel’s hair coral-black underarms with the wingspan-of a predatory Bald Eagle-not a crane, nor a seagull, nor a stork, nor Egret-Envisioned in red wax-an epiphany-so real my head hurt-I sat bolt upright in bed-Thinking why herons on the roof?-And how was I going to get them there?
As in her figural works, Riboud sculpts sensuous captivating imagery out of the physical world in ways that are surprising yet beautiful—Riboud is an incredible storyteller-unabashedly honest, and she illuminates for me feminine beauty in materials and in her words.