Artist Barbara Chase-Riboud: ‘I sculpt what I can’t write and write what I can’t sculpt’

“I couldn’t believe it. There it was. ‘Adam and Eve’. I hadn’t seen it in almost 50 years. I thought to myself, ‘I made that. I made all of it.’”

It is the night before the opening of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s first UK solo exhibition, Infinite Folds, at London’s Serpentine Gallery. “Adam and Eve” (1958) is one of the 83-year-old American artist, poet and author’s first bronze sculptures. This grand and regal work is just one of more than 30 thoughtfully curated by Yesomi Umolu and Chris Bayley, over seven sections of the gallery space. From the “Early Years” through “Material Experimentation”, “Monumental Figures”, “Divine Energies” and eventually the grand finale, “La Musica Josephine Red/Black”, the curation allows viewers to walk through seven artistic aspects of Chase-Riboud’s works, some of which are being shown for the first time.

Chase-Riboud has always seemed to move effortlessly back and forth between creative forms and disciplines, her signature sculptural elements of cast bronze folds, braided, knotted, woven silk and wool fabric cords a running theme. In the exhibition, a combination of “Monument Drawings” — works on paper — and her renowned abstract sculptures create literal and symbolic dichotomies, blending hard materials of bronze and aluminium with the fluidity of silk and wool fibres and textiles. With a concurrent retrospective at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis, and her newly released memoir I Always Knew, all this feels like overdue recognition of Chase-Riboud’s extensive literary and artistic practice.

Infinite Folds opens with an untitled 1973 charcoal drawing. In the forefront of the work is a drawing of a large slab laid flat, reminiscent of a tree stump. It acts like a welcome mat into the rest of the drawing, an eerie, almost three-dimensional sketch of fragments that look like relics from ancient ruins, their large formations stretching to a horizon.

Draughtsmanship was an early skill. Chase-Riboud once said she was taught that she had to be “a painter, an engraver and a draughtsman. If I wanted to be a sculptor I would have to learn to draw first.” Before becoming the first known African-American to receive an MFA in 1960 at the then Yale School of Architecture and Design, Chase-Riboud was classically trained in the early 1950s at Temple University’s Tyler School of Arts in Philadelphia.

“Untitled, 1973” is a thoughtful way into the work of an artist whose overall project seems a continuous excavation of legacy and remembrance. Whether in sculpture, drawings, poetry or novels, Chase-Riboud invites us to question our assumptions about historical narratives and other cultures, as well as how we remember and commemorate people and events of the past. Her work has featured memorials to Malcolm X, Sarah Baartman, Sally Hemings, Nelson Mandela, Cleopatra and Josephine Baker, specifically focusing on how women exude and engage with power. All of it is influenced by her extensive travels across Europe, Africa and Asia during a seven-decade career.

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Chase-Riboud has lived in Paris for more than 50 years. She sold her first piece of art, a woodcut entitled “Reba”, to the Museum of Modern Art when she was only 16, becoming the youngest artist to do so. She first went to study at the American Academy in Rome in 1957 under a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship. There she made her first bronze works using the lost-wax casting method; it was also during her first year in Rome that Chase-Riboud travelled to Egypt. “That was my introduction to non-western art. Simple as that. I thought art was Greek, Roman.”

“One of my favourite stories is that I went to China [in 1965] with Marc [Riboud, her first husband] as the first American woman to set foot in China after the revolution. It was only me, before Kissinger, before Nixon, before Barbara Walters. That was a life-changing trip. It inspired me.”

I ask what she sees as the unifying thread in her work across various disciplines. “There is this cord of historiology and invisibility that goes through everything. That’s the thing that really unites everything, despite my efforts to keep them apart.”

Three selected works in the “Memoria” section of the exhibition from Chase-Riboud’s famed Malcolm X Stele series reflect her interest in monuments and the funerary steles of Egypt. She has spent close to 50 years creating commemorative works for the slain activist. In “Malcolm X #2” (1969), the top half of the stele is a cast black patina bronze structure with the bronze folds flowing side by side like large ripples of cloth. The base is covered with a thick skirt of bundled and braided black wool cords that fall seamlessly from the bronze hem of the top. It creates a stunning visual contrast of material, and gives the illusion that the heavy weight of metal is supported by the delicate threads.

Beyond the powerful and provocative aesthetics of the interaction of such seemingly divergent materials, and its hints of the baroque, it is also symbolic of the deeper theme of turning assumptions on their head and unveiling other possibilities. The sculpture signals too Chase-Riboud’s shift away from figuration — Giacometti was an early influence — to more abstract forms.

Chase-Riboud is also an accomplished writer, with more than 10 published novels and books of poetry. “I sculpt what I can’t write, and I write what I can’t sculpt,” she says. Her first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking, was edited by Toni Morrison at Random House and published to acclaim in 1974. Then, in 1979, under the encouragement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she published her first historical novel, Sally Hemings, exploring the enslaved woman’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

The final work at Infinite Folds also honours an American woman, Josephine Baker. “The last time I saw Josephine was backstage at the Bobino,” Chase-Riboud says. “It was her last performance before she died. We were backstage and I saw this little old lady come out with glasses on, and I looked at my friend and said, ‘This is Josephine?’ And she said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ And as soon as the curtains opened and that lady came out into the spotlight, she transformed herself into a goddess, 6ft tall. I don’t know where the glasses went, or the stoop went, or anything.”

“La Musica Josephine Red/Black” (2021), Chase-Riboud’s most recent work, is a two-metre wave of black patina bronze rising vertically as it curves and flows seemingly against gravity. The sharp lines and angles of the folds of bronze seem to cascade over one another until they end in a flood of long red silk cords falling dramatically from a bronze tip into a vibrant puddle of silk on the black elevated platform. It is a striking reckoning with traditional narratives of monumental sculpture, creating a fluid new language for how we remember and honour particular cultures and histories.

“This exhibition is going to be a surprise. It’s got everything in it.” She beams proudly.

To January 29, serpentinegalleries.org