Barbara Chase Riboud

Early life and education

Barbara Chase was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vivian May Chase, a histology technician, and Charles Edward Chase, a contractor. She was suspended from her middle school being accused, falsely, of plagiarising her poem "Autumn Leaves". Chase displayed an early talent for the arts and began attending the Fleisher Art Memorial School at the age of eight.

She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls from 1948 to 1952, graduating summa cum laude. During graduation, her text "Of Understanding" is read.

She continued her training at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. Chase went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School at Temple University in 1957.

In that same year, Chase won a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome for 12 months. There, she created her first bronze sculptures and exhibited her work. During this time, she traveled to Egypt, where she discovered non-European art. In 1960, Chase completed a master's degree from Yale University School of Design and Architecture. After completing her studies, Chase left the United States for London, then Paris.

Marriage and family

In Paris, Chase met Marc Riboud, a photographer who was part of the Magnum group. They married in 1961 on Christmas Day inside a church. The couple had two sons together, David Charles (b. 1964) and Alexis Karol (b. 1967). They traveled extensively in Russia, India, Greece and North Africa.

Years later they divorced. In 1981, Chase-Riboud married her second husband, Sergio Tosi, an art publisher and expert.

Visual arts career

At Temple University's Tyler School of Art, Chase studied with Boris Blai and "is instructed in sculpture, painting, graphic design, printmaking, color theory, and restoration." She also studied anatomical drawing at Temple University School of Medicine

In 1955, her woodcut Reba was displayed in the Carnegie Hall Gallery as a part of the exhibit It's All Yours (sponsored by Seventeen magazine). This woodcut was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.

The Temple University yearbook Templar published fourteen of her woodcuts in 1956, and in 1958 Chase begins to experiment with bronze sculptures. She uses Lost-wax casting techniques.

Her first solo exhibition was at the Galleria L'Obelisco at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy in 1957. Her first museum exhibition in Europe was held at MOMA Paris in 1961. Her first solo exhibition in Paris was at the Galerie Cadran Solaire in 1966.

Her first public commission was completed in 1960 for the Wheaton Plaza in Wheaton, Maryland. This fountain was formed from pressed aluminum and incorporated abstract shapes, sound and light effects to add to the visual impact of the falling water.

In the late 1960s, Chase-Riboud began to garner broad attention for her sculpture. Nancy Heller describes her work as "startling, ten-foot-tall sculptures that combine powerful cast-bronze abstract shapes with veils of fiber ropes made from silk and wool".

Chase-Ribound and Betye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit in Whitney Museum of American Art as a result of protests organized by Faith Ringgold. Her piece The Ultimate Ground was displayed in the exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture.

In 1971, Chase-Riboud was featured along with four other contemporaries in a documentary about African-American artists entitled "Five." The segment on Chase-Riboud showed her installation in 1970 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, as well as the artist working in her studio.

In 1996 Chase-Riboud was among artists commissioned for artwork at the preserved African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. Her eighteen-foot bronze memorial, Africa Rising, was installed in the Ted Weiss Federal Building 1998. Chase-Riboud also wrote a poem with the same name as the sculpture.

Her work is in major corporate collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Geigy Foundation, New York; and Lannann Foundation, Los Angeles.

Sally Hemings: A Novel

Chase-Riboud first established her reputation as a sculptor and poet. In 1979 she gained widespread attention and critical acclaim for her writing with her first novel Sally Hemings. It was based on the life of Thomas Jefferson's quadroon slave of that name; she was a much-younger half-sister to his late wife and was rumored to have been his concubine for years. In the Summer of 1974 Chase-Riboud had met with editor Jacqueline Onassis to discuss her plans for the work, and Onassis persuaded her to write it. Based on Jefferson's biography by Fawn M. Brodie, Chase-Riboud was among those who believed that Thomas Jefferson fathered six children with Hemings. The young slave was nearly 30 years younger than the president and little had been documented about her life.

Chase-Riboud was the first writer to present a fully realized, fictional character of Sally Hemings, with a rich interior life. Finally Sally Hemings had a voice. The public accepted her portrayal of Hemings and could believe such a woman had a relationship with Jefferson. Sally Hemings was vivid as an American historical figure. Chase-Riboud's book became an international bestseller and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction by an American woman.

It was so popular that CBS planned to adapt it as a TV mini-series. But mainline historians who were still "guarding" Jefferson as an icon of integrity put pressure on president William Paley to end the effort. No adaptation was made at the time.

But, more than 20 years later, CBS produced Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), a made-for-TV mini-series that portrayed Hemings' and Jefferson's relationship. This has been widely accepted since a 1998 DNA study showed a match between a Hemings descendant and the Jefferson male line. Although some reviewers argued about the characterization of Sally Hemings, "no major historian challenged the series' premise that Hemings and Jefferson had a 38-year relationship that produced children." The series featured a beautiful actress as Sally Hemings, as historic accounts of her agreed on her beauty. It also presented African Americans of a range of skin tones, representing the many Hemings mixed-race descendants.

A rearguard of Jefferson historians has continued to deny the possibility of a relationship, but in 2000 and 2001 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, and the National Genealogical Society independently announced their conclusions that Jefferson had likely fathered all of Hemings' children, based on both the DNA and other historical evidence. This historic consensus has been reflected in academic writing about Jefferson and his times. The Smithsonian Museum and Monticello collaborated on a groundbreaking exhibition in 2012 in Washington, DC: Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello, which explored Jefferson as a slaveholder and six of the major slave families. It said that Jefferson was likely the father of all Sally Hemings' children. The exhibit was seen by more than one million people.

Chase-Riboud explored the interweaving relationships between the Hemings' and Jefferson families; as Sally Hemings was a much younger half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, she was an aunt to his two daughters.

"In place of civic myths that deny America's mixed-race beginnings, Chase-Riboud turns to the Hemings family to unveil the historical presence of antebellum interracial relationships and the possibilities of a post-civil rights multiracial community."

Artists, poets, and writers have been thoroughly exploring the Jefferson-Hemings relationship since then.

In 1991, Chase-Riboud won an important copyright decision, Granville Burgess vs. Chase-Riboud. She had filed suit against the playwright of Dusky Sally in 1987, shortly before a production was to open at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She said his work infringed on her copyright for her novel Sally Hemings because it borrowed her fictional ideas. Judge Robert F. Kelly concluded that while

"laws were not enacted to inhibit creativity ... it is one thing to inhibit creativity and another to use the idea-versus-expression distinction as something akin to an absolute defense -- to maintain that the protection of copyright law is negated by any small amount of tinkering with another writer's idea that results in a different expression."

He also said,

"the similarity between the two works is so obvious and so unapologetic that an ordinary observer can only conclude that Burgess felt he was justified in copying 'Sally Hemings,' or at least that there was no legal impediment to doing so, assuming a few modifications were made." The resulting decision constituted a significant victory for artists and writers, reinforcing protection for creative ideas even when expressed in a slightly different form."

Additional novels

Chase-Riboud continued her literary exploration into slavery and exploitation of African people with her subsequent novels. Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986) examined slavery in the Ottoman empire. Her Echo of Lions (1989) was one of the first serious novels about the historic Amistad slave-ship revolt of 1839.

In 1994, Chase-Riboud published The President's Daughter, a work that continued the Sally Hemings story, by imagining the life of her and Jefferson's mixed-race daughter Harriet Hemings. At the age of 21, Harriet left Monticello, given traveling money by Jefferson via his overseer, and went North. She settled in Washington, DC where her brother Beverley had already settled. Like him, she passed into white society. She married a white man, according to her letters to her brother Madison Hemings. He was the only one of the four surviving Hemings children who lived the remainder of his life identifying as African-American.

Chase-Riboud's most recent novel, Hottentot Venus: A Novel (2003), humanizes Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited naked in freak shows in 19th-century Europe.

Lawsuit: Chase-Riboud v. Dreamworks

In 1997, Chase-Riboud settled a suit against DreamWorks for $10 million on charges of copyright infringement of her novel. The author claimed that the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's film Amistad (1997) plagiarized her novel on the topic. It was finally established that David Franzoni, the sole credited screenwriter on Amistad, had spent 3 years, beginning in 1993, writing a script based on Chase-Riboud's book, Echo of Lions. This was under an option held by Dustin Hoffman's Punch production. Chase-Riboud's book which she had sold to Dustin Hoffman's production company which Fransconi claimed he had never read. Burt Fields DreamWorks main lawyer was at the same time unknown to Chase-Ribouds attorneys a stockholder, lawyer and board member of Punch productions who did not recuse himself from the suit, on the contrary he managed to have Punch Productions dropped from the original complaint and Fransconi was never obliged to testify under oath." He may have carried over some of his thinking to his screenplay for Amistad. When Chase-Riboud filed a second suit against DreamWorks in France, the dispute was quickly settled out of court for an undisclosed amount days before the 1998 Oscar nominations were announced.

Poetry

Chase-Riboud's first work of poetry, From Memphis & Peking (1974), was edited by Toni Morrison and published to critical acclaim. Her poetry volume, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, (1987), won the Carl Sandburg Award in 1988. In 1994, Chase-Riboud published Roman Egyptien, poetry written in French. In 2014, Barbara Chase-Riboud published "Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released".

Legacy and honors

Sculptures

Novels

Poetry

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