sgusers5的部落格

Source: The Philadelphia InquirerSept.文件倉 12--Barbara Chase-Riboud vividly remembers traveling from her home in South Philadelphia to the great temple on a hill, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she first took art classes as a little girl."One of my dreams I can remember, going to classes at the museum, was that one day I was going to have an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum and I was going to have a banner across the facade," said Chase-Riboud, now 74. "I remember very well. It's been a long road. I'm a very old lady!"Long road indeed.From Philadelphia to Paris, China, Africa, and now back to her hometown, at least briefly, for something achingly close to that first great childhood ambition and dream. (Paris has been her home for half a century.)On Saturday, a show of Chase-Riboud's work, "The Malcolm X Steles," will open in the museum's Alter Gallery for a run through Jan. 20. The show consists of about 40 works, including five of the great bronze and fabric sculptures -- the "steles" -- dedicated to Malcolm, five related sculptures, a dozen or so drawings made during the 1960s and '70s, at the time the Malcolm works were conceived and developed, and about 20 of her Monument Drawings from the mid-1990s. Curated by Carlos Basualdo, the museum's curator of contemporary art, the show will travel to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the spring."I'm seeing sculpture I haven't seen for 30 years," Chase-Riboud said the other day, as she chatted before beginning the installation of the show. She had just spruced up a bronze sculpture dedicated to the late museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt, carefully repositioning what appeared to be immobile bronze cords but were in fact braided and painted silk, easily manipulated. ("They seem to be bronze," she said, "but in fact they are only thread.")This exhibition of her monumental sculpture and works on paper barely hints at Chase-Riboud's multiple achievements. She is a not only an innovative and deeply thoughtful sculptor and visual artist, she is a distinguished poet and writer of fiction with multiple novels to her credit, including the best-selling Sally Hemmings (1979), which was savagely attacked at the time of its publication for what many scholars viewed as a fanciful portrayal of Thomas Jefferson's long-running love affair with his enslaved maidservant.That affair has since been solidly confirmed through DNA analysis, and Chase-Riboud's novel and the mountains of research she put into it have been thoroughly vindicated.Her multifaceted, award-winning work as artist, poet, and novelist was also noted in Congress this week, when Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa.) proclaimed her "a truly renaissance woman" whose achievement is recognized around the world.""What I've been trying to do, certainly with the books, has been to include the black presence in American history," she said. "I hit the jackpot [with Sally Hemmings]. All of my books have something to with excavating these invisibles in history that should have biographies, that should have monuments, that should have all these things but don't -- for political reasons, for gender reasons, for racial reasons, for whatever."This was my mission, and I think it began when I went to Europe for the first time and realized I 存倉as not the center of the world -- that there were continents to explore and civilizations which had nothing to do with my upbringing or my education. They were important. Not only important, they were essential, and finally they turned out as essential for me. I don't think I would have developed my style, my mature sculptures, without having the experience of traveling around the world, brushing against all these other cultures and all these other civilizations, both ancient and modern."Chase-Riboud speaks quietly and fluently, her black hair hanging straight, her slender hands occasionally rising for emphasis, her voice clear and faintly melodic. Her sense of American history and of her own past comes effortlessly to illustrate one point or another, but there is humor too, and a strong sense of irony.She began the Malcolm X series in the 1960s, after Malcolm's assassination. But the pieces were not inspired by that horrific event. In fact, it was only when she was well along with the first four in the series that, still feeling the sting, she decided to dedicate the series to the slain leader.The project actually began as an effort to work through formal problems, and the steles' characteristic fabric "skirts" are the result of Chase-Riboud's decision to stabilize the large sculptures without revealing armature or creating "legs."In this formal answer to aesthetic and technical questions, a distinctly abstract but anthropomorphic form emerged, sculptures that suggest figures, but are, in fact, something else. In the baroque manipulation of forms, these pieces become suggestive emblems of black American pain and transcendence."I wanted something that was purely abstract because that was the way I was going, and I wanted something that would also be a kind of personage, but a personage not recognized as such," she said. "Something incredible happened when I put the fiber and the bronze together and suddenly I had these steles."The pieces, which owe much to the intricacies and flamboyance of Bernini, were attacked at the time they were first shown by several eminent white art critics who suggested that Chase-Riboud was presenting something inauthentic, as though "black" art should only reflect non-European tribalism. That was a surprise to Chase-Riboud at the time. She says she didn't have "a clue that this would create a kind of furor."The Art Museum, she says, "is not about race" nor is it about "black art." What the museum is exhibiting is the work "of an American artist and her discoveries as an artist and as a poet.""I don't want to talk about expatriatism," she said. "I don't want to talk about negritude. This is strictly about art and literature."The Malcolm X StelesSaturday through Jan. 20 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Wednesday and Friday evenings until 8:45 p.m. Adults, $20; 65 and over, $18; students with valid ID, $14; 13–18, $14: 12 and under, free. 215-763-8100 or .philamuseum.org.Contact culture writer Stephan Salisbury at 215-854-5594, ssalisbury@phillynews.com, or @SPSalisbury on TwitterCopyright: ___ (c)2013 The Philadelphia Inquirer Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at .philly.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉