Barbara Chase-Riboud is an internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet, and novelist whose career bridges continents, disciplines, and centuries of history. Born in Philadelphia, Chase-Riboud demonstrated prodigious talent early, winning a national art prize from Seventeen magazine at age fifteen. She earned her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (1957) and her MFA from Yale University (1960), becoming one of the first African-American women to receive that degree from Yale’s School of Design and Architecture. After a formative fellowship in Rome, she settled in Paris, where she continues to live and work.

Chase-Riboud, though best known for her towering sculptures of bronze and aluminum, adeptly distills the elements of architecture to the two-dimensional, creating a hybrid visual elegy. The print in this collection, Akhmatova’s Monument (1995), evokes the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whose writing bore witness to the violence of Stalin’s regime. Its intricate linework and textual fragments suggest memory’s survival through art and language.

A writer as well as a visual artist, Chase-Riboud is the author of several volumes of poetry and the acclaimed historical novels Sally Hemings (1979) and Echo of Lions (1989), both praised for their lyrical command and moral insight. Her sculpture and works on paper have been exhibited internationally, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Serpentine Gallery (London), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

In 2023, the Serpentine Gallery presented Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds, a major retrospective reaffirming her global stature. Her works reside in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Museum of Modern Art. Through a lifetime of innovation, Chase-Riboud continues to redefine the possibilities of sculpture, merging poetry, history, and form into a singular artistic legacy.

From September 2024 to January 2025, the exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot Is Undone, A God Is Released, showcasing the artist's sculpture, drawing, and poetry from 1958 to the present, was on view across eight separate institutions in Paris: Musée d’Orsay, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Musée du Louvre, Philharmonie de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Guimet, and Palais de Tokyo.

Barbara Chase-Riboud at "The Encounter" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.