(Earlier in the decade, she had toured Africa, exhibiting work at the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, and in 1969 attending the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, where she met Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers.) Though the sculptures, which she continued making through 2018, evolved in composition over the years, Chase-Riboud created each using the same technique, manipulating thin sheets of wax into towering geometric forms, then casting them in bronze and draping them with skeins of spun silk and wool. The stately mixed-media steles - most over six feet tall, like Malcolm X himself - were also informed by Chase-Riboud’s study of ancient Egyptian funerary practices. In 1969, Chase-Riboud began making her formative work “Malcolm X,” a series of 20 sculptural odes to the civil rights activist, who had been assassinated four years before. “It’s imbued with history, it’s the material of artisans of the Kingdom of Benin and the Baroque.” And though she would soon develop a more hybrid technique, incorporating ropes, textiles and other organic materials, bronze became a through line in her work. In 1957, the American artist Ben Shahn, a hero of Chase-Riboud’s, bought her first bronze sculpture, a work comprising a realist human form presented atop a complex abstract base. ![]() And of course, I had already been at the academy in Rome, which was the same situation: It was all male.” She focused instead on her sculpture and drawing practices, imbibing the work of major influences across different disciplines - including the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, the painters Wifredo Lam and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger - and carving out a style that is uniquely hers. One in philosophy, one in law and then there was me,” she recalled recently. “There were three Black women in the grad school at Yale in ’57. And in the following decades, which Chase-Riboud, now 83, has spent mostly in Paris - where she lives in an Art Deco apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement - she has established herself as one of the most prolific and boundary-breaking artists of her generation, making work defined by both its technical prowess and its searing meditations on American history.Īs a tall Black woman artist with an unwavering artistic identity, Chase-Riboud stood out among her peers at the turn of the 1960s, who were mostly white and male. In the late 1950s, she briefly returned to the States to study design and architecture - under Josef Albers, Alvin Eisenman, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn and Vincent Scully - at the Yale School of Art, becoming the first known woman of color to earn her M.F.A. ![]() ![]() From Philadelphia - where she was born and as a child took art classes at the Philadelphia Art Museum - she traveled to New York and then, after winning a Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy, to Rome, where she still casts the large-scale bronze sculptures for which she is best known. It was an auspicious start to a truly epic life, and career. ![]() He has also served as Composer-in-Residence for the New York-based dance company, RamosDance.The American artist and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud sold her first work, a woodcut titled “Reba,” in 1955, to the Museum of Modern Art she made it when she was 15 years old. Winner of Boston University's 1996 ALEA III International Composition Competition, Hemenger's residencies and fellowships include the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Banff Centre, Omi International Arts Center, and the Bowdoin and Aspen Music Festivals. Drew Hemenger's works have been commissioned by the the Boulder Philharmonic, Rogue Valley Symphony, AIDS Quilt Songbook 20, The Auros Ensemble, Chamber Music Yellow Springs, Sweden's Duo Con Forza, the Goldman Memorial Band, Madrid's Jones & Maruri Cello/Guitar Duo, The Lively Arts at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chicago's Orion Ensemble, pianists Pascal and Ami Rogé, Symphony New Hampshire, and the University of Texas at Austin.Ĭommercial recordings include Songs from America recorded by the Jones&Maruri Cello/Guitar Duo on EMEC Discos, an EP of Four Places in New York recorded by pianist Henry Wong-Doe on Hemenger’s own label, and Her Final Show by Anthony Dean Griffey and Thomas Bagwell on GPRecords produced in collaboration with Sing for Hope, the CD includes music from the AIDS Quilt Songbook 20 concert on World AIDS day 2012 at Cooper Union.
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