Barbara Chase Riboud Sculptor

This richly illustrated book presents the first comprehensive overview of Chase-Ribound's 30-year career as a sculptor & draftsman. Distinguished art historians Peter Selz & Anthony F. Janson show how history, archaeology, spiritualism, the Baroque tradition, & Chase-Riboud's parallel career as a poet-novelist have influenced her work, from the Malcolm X, Tantra, Zanzibar, & Cleopatra series to her recent monument "Africa Rising."

Catalogue of an exhibition at Philadelphia Museum of Art, held September 14, 2013 - January 20, 2014 and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, February 12 - April 27, 2014.

A fictional account of the relationship between American statesman Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever. Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.

The author of the award-winning Sally Hemings now brings to life Hannah Elias, one of the richest black women in America in the early 1900s, in this mesmerizing novel swirling with atmosphere and steeped in history. A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias’ glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West. This is the beginning of an odyssey that moves back and forth in time and reveals the dangerous secrets of a mysterious woman, the fortune she built, and her precipitous fall. Born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, Hannah Elias has done things she’s not proud of to survive. Shedding her past, Hannah slips on a new identity before relocating to New York City to become as rich as a robber baron. Hannah quietly invests in the stock market, growing her fortune with the help of businessmen. As the money pours in, Hannah hides her millions across 29 banks. Finally attaining the life she’s always dreamed, she buys a mansion on the Upper West Side and decorates it in gold and first-rate décor, inspired by her idol Cleopatra. The unsolved murder turns Hannah’s world upside-down and threatens to destroy everything she’s built. When the truth of her identity is uncovered, thousands of protestors gather in front of her stately home. Hounded by the salacious press, the very private Mrs. Elias finds herself alone, ensnared in a scandalous trial, and accused of stealing her fortune from whites. Packed with glamour, suspense, and drama, populated with real-life luminaries from the period, The Great Mrs. Elias brings a fascinating woman and the age she embodied to glorious, tragic life.

Epic saga of slavery in America based on the controversial historical figure - Joseph Cinque.

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today. Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late '70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late '80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.

"Accompanying the largest monographic exhibition of trailblazing artist Barbara Chase-Riboud's (b. 1939, Philadelphia) work to date, Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes traces the full output of the artist's remarkable career from the 1950s to the present. The catalogue features both celebrated and never-before-seen artworks, highlighting the artist's groundbreaking role in the field of contemporary sculpture. In addition to some fifty sculptures, the book presents twenty works on paper, as well as a selection of Chase-Riboud's internationally acclaimed poetry. It also includes excerpts from an interview with the artist conducted for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The catalogue offers a careful consideration of the many diverse aspects of the artist's practice, and in doing so, it provides unprecedented insights into her meditations on form, memory, and monument, while revealing a rich array of global art-historical and literary points of inspiration"--