Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation.
Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Sally Hemings, in 1979.The novel has been described as the "first full blown imagining" of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres She currently divides her time between Paris, France and Rome, Italy.
Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Vivian May Chase, a histology technician and Charles Edward Chase, a contractor. Chase-Riboud displayed an early talent for the arts and began attending the Fleisher Art Memorial School at the age of 8. Between 1947 and 1954, she continued her training at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and won an award from Seventeen for one of her prints, which was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. Chase-Riboud went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School at Temple University in 1957. In that same year, she won a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome for 12 months. Here, she created her first bronze sculptures and exhibited her work at the Spoleto Festival in 1957 as well as the American Academy and the Gallery L'Obeliso the following year. During this time she also had the opportunity to travel to Egypt where she discovered non-European art. In 1960, Chase-Riboud completed a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University.
After completing her studies, Chase-Riboud moved to Paris where she eventually met French photo journalist Marc Riboud, whom she married in 1961. The couple had two sons and traveled extensively together on photo assignments in Russia, India, Greece and North Africa. In 1981, Chase-Riboud married her second husband, art-expert Sergio Tosi.
Chase-Riboud began to garner broad attention from her artistic work in the latter half of the 1960s, launching exhibitions in the New York Architectural League Show (1965), the Festival of Negro Art in Dakar (1966) and the L'Oeil Ecoute Festival in Avignon (1969). According to art critic Samella Lewis, Chase-Riboud's sculptures are remarkable for their "traditional lost-wax technique and include braided-, knotted-, and wrapped fiber areas that recall weaving and the fabric arts". 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". Over time, her sculptures began to reflect African symbols as well as contemporary political themes, such as her "Malcolm X" series (1969—1970).
While Chase-Riboud first established her reputation as a sculptor, she gained widespread attention and critical acclaim for her writing with the publication of her novel "Sally Hemings" in 1979. The book, a fictional account of Hemings' sexual and romantic relationship with her Thomas Jefferson, earned the scorn of most Jefferson scholars who, at the time, denied that any such liaison took place. Chase-Riboud, as well as other writers and scholars including Winthrop Jordan and Fawn M. Brodie maintained that Jefferson fathered five children with Hemmings, an American slave of mixed racial heritage. Hemings was nearly 30 years younger than Jefferson and happened to be the half-sister of his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Scholars such as Sidney P. Moss dismissed these claims as the "Jefferson miscegenation legend," contending that the Jefferson-Hemings affair was devoid of factual basis. The tide of public opinion began to change in 1998, when DNA evidence reported in the scientific journal Nature was unable to rule out the possibility that Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which oversees and operates Monticello, concluded that "although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings." Specialists, however, continue to debate whether Hemings and Jefferson engaged in a romantic and sexual relationship.(See Sally Hemings and Jefferson DNA data).
In 1991, Chase-Riboud won a landmark copyright infringement trial against Granville Burgess, the author of a play about Hemings entitled Dusky Sally. Chase-Riboud asserted that Burgess plagiarized her ideas by re-creating similar scenes and passages detailed in her book. 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." The resulting decision constituted a significant victory for artists and writers, reinforcing protection for creative ideas even when expressed in a slightly different form.
Echo of Lions and Dreamworks suit
Chase-Riboud continued her literary exploration into slavery with her second and third novels. Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986) examined slavery in the Ottoman empire, while Echo of Lions (1989) was one of the first in-depth fictional account of the Amistad slave-ship revolt. In 1997, Chase-Riboud sued the production studio Dreamworks for $10 million on charges of copyright infringement. The author claimed that the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's film Amistad plagiarized from her novel. While Chase-Riboud eventually withdrew her charges, Dreamworks countersued by demonstrating that Chase-Riboud had herself plagiarized fromWilliam Owens's 1954 novel "Slave Mutiny," reissued in the 1990s under the title "Black Mutiny." The suit resulted in an out-of-court settlement, the terms of which were undisclosed.
