Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American and French visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet.

After becoming established as a sculptor and poet, Chase-Riboud gained widespread recognition as an author for her novel Sally Hemings (1979). It earned the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction, and became an international success.

Chase-Riboud's novel about Sally Hemings generated discussion about the likely relationship between the young enslaved woman and her master, Thomas Jefferson, who became president of the United States. Mainline historians rejected Chase-Riboud's portrayal and persuaded CBS not to produce a planned TV mini-series adapted from the novel. Following DNA analysis of descendants in 1998, the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is widely accepted by historians as fact, including those who had objected before.

From September 2024 to January 2025, the solo exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released showcased her sculpture, drawing and poetry from 1958 to the present in eight major institutions in Paris, France – 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 – the first such celebration of a living artist.

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. Chase displayed an early talent for the arts and began attending the Fleisher Art Memorial School at the age of eight. She was suspended from her middle school after being accused, mistakenly, of plagiarizing her poem "Autumn Leaves". She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls from 1948 to 1952, graduating summa cum laude. During graduation, her text "Of Understanding" was read. In that same year, Chase won a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome for 12 months. During this time, she traveled to Egypt, where she discovered non-European art. She is the first African-American woman to have received the MFA degree from Yale University. After completing her studies, Chase left the United States for London, England, and then Paris, France.

Career Chase-Riboud is an acclaimed sculptor, poet, and novelist. She has worked across a variety of media throughout her long career.

Visual arts At Temple University's Tyler School of Art, she studied with Boris Blai and was "instructed in sculpture, painting, graphic design, printmaking, color theory, and restoration."

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).

Chase-Riboud exhibited work at the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, and she attended the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969.

Chase-Riboud and Betye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit in the Whitney Museum of American Art, following protests organized by Faith Ringgold to gain more recognition of Black women artists. Her piece The Ultimate Ground was displayed in the exhibition Contemporary American Sculpture.

In 1996, Chase-Riboud was among artists commissioned for artwork at the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. Her 18-foot bronze memorial, Africa Rising, was installed in the Ted Weiss Federal Building in 1998. Chase-Riboud also wrote a poem with the same name as the sculpture.

Continuing to work as a sculptor throughout her life, Chase-Riboud creates drawings and sculptures that are exhibited and collected by museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Newark Museum, New Jersey, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. During September 2013 to January 2014, she exhibited artwork spanning fifty years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition: Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles. This traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from February 12 to April 28, 2014.

Her work was featured in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s–1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.

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. The scale of the show and number of museums involved in the exhibition was described by The New York Times as a first for any living artist.

Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Her work is in museum collections and museums including Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; and Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles. In 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Sally Hemings (1979). The novel has been described as the "first full blown imagining" of Hemings and her life as a slave, including her long-rumored concubine relationship with President Thomas Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, as mainline historians of the time denied the relationship and the mixed-race children she bore to Jefferson, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. Sally Hemings sold more than one million copies in hardcover and it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It was reissued in 1994. In 2009, it was published in paperback, together with her novel, President's Daughter (1994), about Harriet Hemings, daughter of Hemings and Jefferson, who passed into white society.

Chase-Riboud began her writing career as a poet, publishing her first work Memphis & Peking (1974), edited by Toni Morrison, and more recent collections. Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released: Collected and New Poems 1974–2011 is Chase-Riboud's latest, published in 2014.

She has continued her literary exploration into the enslavement and exploitation of African people with her subsequent novels. Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986) examined slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Based on Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Jefferson, Chase-Riboud was among those who believed that Thomas Jefferson fathered six children with Hemings. The young slave was nearly thirty 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 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, selling more than one million hardcover books, and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction by an American woman. No adaptation was made at the time.

However, more than twenty years later, CBS produced Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), a made-for-television mini-series that portrays Hemings's 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." 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 intricate relationships between the Hemings's and Jefferson families. Because Sally Hemings was a much-younger half-sister of Jefferson's late wife (they had the same father, John Wayles), 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." The writer 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 three 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 Productions. Franzoni claimed he had never read Chase-Riboud's book, which she had sold to Hoffman's production company. Burt Fields, DreamWorks main lawyer, was at the same time, unbeknownst to Chase-Riboud's attorneys, a stockholder, lawyer and board member of Punch Productions. He did not recuse himself from the suit, but had Punch Productions dropped from the original complaint. Franzoni 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. She contributed the poem "Ode to My Grandfather at the Somme 1918" to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Other activities Photographed by Jack Davison and choreographed by Lenio Kaklea, Chase-Riboud was featured in Bottega Veneta's 2025 advertising campaign celebrating the 50th anniversary of its signature Intrecciato leather.

Personal life In Paris, Chase met Marc Riboud, a photographer who was part of the Magnum group. They married in 1961 on Christmas Day in a church. The couple had two sons together, David Charles Riboud (b. 1964) and Alexis Karol Riboud (b. 1967), and they traveled extensively in Russia, India, Greece and North Africa. 1995: James Van Dar Zee Award for Lifetime Achievement 1996: honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Connecticut. 2005: "Best Fiction Book of 2004" by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association for Hottentot Venus 2007: College Art Association Women's Caucus for Art lifetime achievement award. 2007: Alain Locke Award from Detroit Institute of Arts 2020: "Anonymous Was A Woman" from the Rockefeller Foundation 2021: "Laureate of Prix d'Honneur" from AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) 2021: "Laureate of Grand Prix Artistique de la Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca" 2022: knighted by the French Government and awarded the "Legion d'Honneur".

Selected works

Sculptures Last Supper (1958) The Albino (1972) Confession for Myself (1973) Cleopatra's Cape (1973) Africa Rising (1998) Mao's Organ (2008)

Novels Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979). /reprinted in paperback, 2009 Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986). Echo of Lions (1989). The President's Daughter (1994). /reprinted in paperback, 2009 Hottentot Venus: A Novel (2003). The Great Mrs. Elias: A Novel (2022).

Poetry From Memphis & Peking (1974). Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (1987). Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released (2014).

Memoir

I Always Knew: A Memoir (2022).