Barbara Chase-Riboud
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Writer, Sculptor
Barbara Chase-Riboud is a trailblazing artist and writer.
Born in 1929, she grew up in a middle-class black neighborhood
near downtown Philadelphia. Her grandmother, the
head of the household, was determined that Chase-Riboud
should have the same well-rounded education available to
any child in America and insisted that she take art and dance
classes. Chase-Riboud’s parents both possessed artistic talent.
Her father was rejected from architecture school because of
his color and abandoned painting to run the family’s construction
business, while her mother discovered her ability as
a fiber artist only in retirement.
Chase-Riboud began her formal art studies at the age of
seven at the Fletcher Art Memorial School and the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, where it became evident that she was a
prodigy. Although she was the only black child in her classes,
she never felt out of place. She continued her training at
the Philadelphia High School for Girls, received a BFA at the
Tyler School of Art and Design, and went to the American
Academy in Rome on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. On her
return, she attended Yale University on scholarship.
Chase-Riboud has achieved success in a wide variety of
artistic areas. She was invited to the People’s Republic of
China, where she met with Chou en Lai and was invited to
a state dinner with Mao Zedong. She wrote the “Chinese”
poems after that visit. She went on to exhibit her memorial
sculpture to Malcolm X at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and began writing a novel, Sally Hemings, which
was later acquired and edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The novel, received international acclaim and won her the
J.H. Kafka prize for a novel written by an American woman.
She also was commissioned by the U.S. General Services