Born in the 1930s in Philadelphia, Barbara Chase-Riboud has built a multidisciplinary practice spanning drawing, sculpture, poetry, and fiction. Her 2022 epistolary memoir I Always Knew assembles decades of letters sent to her mother, beginning with those she wrote during a 1957 Atlantic crossing aboard the French Line ship Flandre. What follows is a fellowship in Rome, work for the film studio Cinecittà, a tumultuous yet transformative voyage to Egypt, and, in 1965, a journey into a China that had long been out of bounds for Americans. By then, the aperture of her world had expanded. Rather than return to the States, she stayed in Paris, the city she has called home since 1961. In 2024, her adopted country staged an unprecedented exhibition in her honor, Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released. Curated by Erin Jenoa Gilbert and Donatien Grau, it showcased the diversity of Chase-Riboud’s work simultaneously across eight prestigious Parisian sites, including the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Centre Pompidou.

Chase-Riboud is perhaps best recognized for her monumental bronze sculptures, which she casts from meticulously hand-formed wax molds and often drapes with silk and wool. Many are dedicated to historical figures — since the late 1960s, she has made a series of steles memorializing Malcolm X, while more recently she has imagined folded bronze forms centering on Josephine Baker. She has also taken on the question of biography through the medium of fiction. Her best-selling 1979 novel Sally Hemings advanced the theory that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with the woman he enslaved. Historians went on the attack, but in 1998 DNA evidence supported Chase-Riboud’s supposition. Five more research-heavy novels followed, addressing subjects such as the Amistad rebellion, the fate of the “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman, and most recently the Gilded Age real-estate mogul Hannah Elias.

Alongside — and embedded in — these prose and sculptural practices, Chase-Riboud has always written poetry, publishing collections centered on places (From Memphis & Peking) and people (Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra). Her intricately stitched works on paper often borrow their titles from her poetry, as did her 2024 Paris exhibition, which placed her writing in dialogue with both her own sculptures and other works in the participating museums’ collections. This PIN–UP Spécial encompasses the full range of her production, from sculpture and poetry — including an excerpt from her most recent epic poem, Helicopter — to works on paper, such as her rarely seen Monument drawings, alongside recent portraits by Liz Johnson Artur made in her former Paris studio (once home to Max Ernst).

Chase-Riboud’s career could be described as a litany of firsts: the first and youngest Black female artist to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art; the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale; the first-known American woman to enter Maoist China after 1949; the first living artist to exhibit in the Louvre’s pyramid. But to hew to that timeline would be to miss the rich synchronicities and transhistorical connections her work makes visible. Her wax-and-bronze method descends from centuries-old practices of the Kingdom of Benin; figures like Cleopatra are as central to her oeuvre as 20th-centuryicons; and the deep history of the United States’ foundational violence is confronted in works like Africa Rising, the 1996 monument she made for the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. At the Louvre, her sculptures stood in the Egyptian and Greek galleries not in homage, but as peers.

Across these different forms, a poem can become a title, a sculpture, a drawing, or a book, while bodies, monuments, rooms, and histories continually change scale and medium. It is this spatial and temporal imagination — at once archaeological, architectural, and speculative — that has made her such an enduring point of reference for generations of artists. Almost seven decades into her career, Chase-Riboud’s work continues to occupy a space of its own majestic making.

For PIN–UP, Chase-Riboud spoke with KUKII, the Paris-born Egyptian-Iranian musician formerly known as Lafawndah, whose own creative practice has been shaped by a return to Cairo. Their conversation moves from the formative experiences of childhood and travel to sculpture, writing, and the question of whether artists choose their ideas or are chosen by them.

Kukii: Do you remember the first time you made an artwork or wrote something that could stand on its own?

Barbara Chase-Riboud: My mother, my grandmother, and my family seemed to think that I had something to do with art as a profession at the age of three. By the age of seven, I was going to museum classes, to ballet classes, to piano lessons, and a few other things, including the Girl Scouts. I was a very busy little girl. I thought this is what everybody did.

So, people had decided for you at a very young age that you were an artist?

No, I don’t think that has anything to do with how you become an artist. I’m sure there are thousands of parents who send their children to the museum, who send them to piano lessons and ballet lessons. It doesn’t turn anybody into an artist unless they are.

Yes. There’s something very divine about this, about our gifts. I don’t think we choose them. What we choose is how much space we give to our gifts, or how much dedication we give them.

BCR: I don’t philosophize about it. I didn’t have a choice.

I understand. I won’t philosophize anymore.

So at 19, after graduating from art school, I found myself with a John Hay Whitney Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. I had never been out of Philadelphia in my life. That was the game changer. Setting foot in another country on another continent.

What about Cairo? Did that happen while you were in Rome?

I was in the academy, and there was this very famous couple who said to me, “Barbara, why are you sticking with all these Americans in the academy when there’s the whole world out there? You have to get out of academia. We’re going to Egypt tonight.” It was New Year’s Eve. She said, “Why don’t you come with us.” I ran up the stairs, packed my little bag and left with them that night on a steamer which was going to Alexandria. Beautiful. When I got off the boat, the couple said to me: “Well, Barbara, congratulations, you made it. Good luck.” And they left me, standing there on the quayside. I had barely been outside of Philadelphia. I was 19. And here I was. I had my stipend and a little suitcase. So what was I supposed to do? Either I could turn around and go back upstairs and get back on the boat, go back to Rome, or I could step off the boat and go up to the first police officer and ask what to do. Everybody spoke English. I told him that my friends had left me on the quay, and I didn’t know where to go. He looked me up and down and said to go to the Hilton Hotel. It was the most beautiful hotel in Alexandria. I walked into the lobby and this very elegant Egyptian gentleman was sitting there. He came up to me and said, “What are you doing wandering around alone? Where’s your mother? Where’s your nanny?” I told him what happened. He said, “Look, I’m going to send you to the American embassy immediately. Don’t talk to anyone, just get there.” That guy in the lobby happened to be the president of Coca-Cola in Egypt.

Crazy!

I got to the American embassy. The cultural attaché was a Black guy. He said, “What in the world are you doing all by yourself? There’s a war going on. You’regonna end up dead.” I told the story again, and as a result, I stayed for almost two months with this guy’s family. I went up and down the Nile. This was the beginning of my thirst for doing the right thing at the wrong time, or doing the wrong thing at the right time. It was also one of many risks I took early on that changed the course of my life.

You said that if you hadn’t seen sculpture in Egypt, you wouldn’t have tried making it yourself. What was it about it that inspired you?

To make a long story short, it was not something I decided. I wanted only to make sense of what I was feeling and what I was.

Would you say sculpture came to you then?

I came to sculpture. Sculpture couldn’t care less about me or anybody else.

Ha! I think about ideas as separate entities. I think they have a life of their own, and that they choose their mothers, they choose their wombs. It’s the same for a book or a song, don’t you think?

No. People aren’t chosen. People choose.They make their own songs. They make their own objects. I never felt chosen by anybody or by any object.

I feel very differently about this when I make music. It doesn’t feel like much of a choice. There is choice in the craft, choice in the time, choice in the container, but I definitely feel chosen by the ideas themselves. It’s something that needs a voice coming to me. I don’thave so much control over it. It’s also the same tension I feel in faith and therefore in all life: what comes from my destiny and my free will inside of this? They superimpose on each other. This tension between something that’s written for us that we don’t choose, and the free will inside of this is something I think about a lot. What about your writing?You’ve said, “I sculpt what I can’t write and write what I can’t sculpt.” It’svery interesting to me that the stories you write about are hidden, buried, unseen. They’re not the main-plotstories we know.

They are stories that we know, but that get overshadowed by history, by thousands of things — wars, prejudice, religion. Although it’sa completely different exercise, bringing these people to life has parallels with making sculpture. I think of writing as architecture. There’s a room and there are doors, stairways, and windows. Books are constructing a world. So it has to stand. It has to have structure. Somebody has to think of that structure, and somebody has to write that structure. And at the end it has to be comprehensible to other people. Otherwise, why write a book?

Do you think about this when you make sculpture? For things to be comprehensible?

No. When I make sculptures, I’m not thinking about anything.

Are you writing anything at the moment?

I just finished a long epic poem called Helicopter. Poems are as close to a sculpture as you could get. That will be the next thing I publish. As a matter of fact, I wrote it for the American Academy in Rome. It’s a full circle,sinceI started out making sculpture in Rome.

On the subject of full circles, let’s talk about time.When Ifirst encountered your work, I felt like I was looking at a point where the distant past meets the future. You use lost-wax casting, a 6,000-year-old technique, but your work feels suspended in time and space. It could come from thousands and thousands of years ago, or from an alien spaceship that dropped it here from a million years in the future. Do you think about time that way when you make your work?

I think you’re right. The same goes for my writing. Thousands of years have gone into those same words. There’s this underground history that runs very deep until it comes out. In fact, my first sculptures were made from antique bones. I made a whole series of them in the 60s and 70s.

You have a long list of achievements as the “first” — the first to do this or that, the first to be here or there. You’vebeen the first in many places, many times. I wonder what it does to one’s work to be the first all the time.

You don’t know that you’re the first anything. It’s not a matter of thinking historically. It’s just a matter of walking into situations and trying to cope with something new, something people don’t understand or don’t care about. The reason people ignore poets and artists is because they are the first to illuminate something that no one else has thought about in exactly that way. That’s me being the first. And so you get the prejudice and the hate and the misunderstanding, but you also get this kind of dehumanization — that you’re evil, or that you’re out to get them, or that you’re out to destroy what they know. And that’s why artists get into big trouble, especially with historians and politicians —they’re trying to make truth.I’m only trying to get you to believe something that is true.