Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939, Philadelphia) is an American sculptor, novelist, and poet who has lived and worked in Rome and Paris since the 1960s. She studied at the Yale School of Fine Art (MFA, 1960), where she was one of the few Black students of her generation.

Her sculptural practice is organized around the stele — a monumental vertical form made from cast bronze combined with lengths of woven silk and wool, whose interaction of rigid and fluid materials creates works of great formal complexity and associative power. The Malcolm X Steles (begun in the 1960s) are her most widely known sculptures; works in the series have entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and major institutions in Europe. Each stele is named for a historical figure or event, and the series has been substantially extended across decades. Her sculpture engages with histories of resistance, the body, and the monument itself.

Chase-Riboud is also a novelist. Sally Hemings (1979), her first novel, told the story of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved partner and their children — a work that was groundbreaking in its subject and its literary ambition and that generated legal and political controversy in the United States. Echo of Lions (1989) and The Hottentot Venus (2003) continued her engagement with forgotten or distorted Black historical figures. She has also published several volumes of poetry. A major retrospective of her work was presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.