Barbara Chase-Riboud’s solo exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation is titled after her large bronze sculptures, but the show reveals a wide range of the African-American, Paris-based artist’s work, dating from 1966 to last year.
The “Cleopatra Series” staged in the museum basement may be the most breathtaking work exhibited. Though the pieces end up being quite large, she fashioned them from thousands of small bronze plaques, woven together with gold wire and draped over metal and wooden frames. Especially “Cleopatra’s Chair” (1994) shimmers in the dimly lit space like a golden throne in a queen’s tomb.
The honor paid to Cleopatra is in keeping both with Chase-Riboud’s engagement with world historical figures and her habit of spotlighting women independently of any man who has been used to define them.
The plaques are inscribed, not with hieroglyphics, but with symbols from the private language that Chase-Riboud has evolved. That same language is written in graphite on homemade paper in “Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract” (2000), alongside sketches and wax impressions from seals that look like passport stamps, with the actual seals dangling from the paper by cord.Â
The honor paid to Cleopatra is in keeping both with Chase-Riboud’s engagement with world historical figures and her habit of spotlighting women independently of any man who has been used to define them. (It’s not Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s Marriage Contract.) Also staged in the basement is her series on Sarah Baartman, the Southern African woman exploited by white showmen as “the Hottentot Venus.” Chase-Riboud figured Baartman in two very different bronzes and one drawing. One small bronze is a study for what became a monumental sculpture (“Africa Rising,” 1998) that stands in the Ted Weiss Federal Building in New York. This bust of Baartman has forms suggestive of primitive agricultural implements, snaky hair, and the human brain. A taller bronze devoted to Baartman, “Black Obelisk #2 (2007), evokes a slender squid fashioned from the barrels of guns.
The main upstairs space of the museum is devoted to the monumental bronzes that give the show its name. She forms the bronze into thin sheets with pleats and folds and places these complex forms atop silk typically formed in coils, all supported by a wooden or metal frame. That is, the assemblage may be monumental, but the bronze is worked into very thin sheets that are cast in various forms, none of them especially huge.
The Pulitzer has exhibited five such bronze sculptures dedicated to Malcolm X, though you wouldn’t pick the Malcolms out of the crowd. “Malcolm X #13” (2008), like many of her bronze sculptures, suggests long, narrow African masks, though the only facial gesture is a hint of a sly smile. “Malcolm X #9” (2007) looks like an African mask made of anvils and elephants. “Malcolm X #19″ (2017) looks more like Darth Vadar” than the sculpture’s namesake. “Malcolm X #18” (2016) is hardly figural at all, but here Chase-Riboud makes her statements on the surface of the bronze, which looks visibly hammered, deformed, weathered and scarred.
My favorite of the bronze sculptures, “Woman’s Monument” (1998), stands alone in the basement vestibule. Its jumble of figural associations include the Rosetta Stone, a Torah, a sled, a cowbell, the horn of a saddle and a giant tongue, all riddled with the artist’s private language. Sculptures she made in response to music and musicians (“La Musica”), also staged in the basement, do evoke musical instruments – a harp, a keyboard – but also mountainous cliffs, braided hair, the kind of iron you press clothes with, and a vacuum sweeper choking on its own cord.
To further indicate the range of this exhibition, curator Stephanie Weissberg of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation also included drawings the artist made to complement her bronze monuments (where she replicates the tight coils of silk with amazingly intricate and obsessive marks in ink), all-white works on paper where she stitches her private language in synthetic white silk, and – in the front Entrance Gallery – charcoal and pencil drawings from the 1960s and early 1970s. These were drawn when Chase-Riboud was still trying to figure out who she would become, and it’s exciting to look at these sketches again, with their pulsating energy, their skulls and masks, their canyons and bones, after you have seen where they would lead.Â
Only when exiting, if at all, will most visitors realize that “Monumentale: The Bronzes” – the largest monographic exhibition of this major African-American artist’s work to date – actually begins before you enter the museum. There in the museum’s Entrance Courtyard stands the most recent work in the show, also the most composed and restrained of the bronze monuments, “Standing Black Woman of Venice” (2021). I didn’t recognize it as part of the show on the way in because it looks like it belongs exactly there.
The Pulitzer, famously, has a permanent collection of precisely three pieces, the installations by Ellsworth Kelly (on the east wall), Scott Burton (by the water) and Richard Serra (out back). Perhaps the Pulitzer should buy and permanently exhibit its first piece by an artist who is neither white nor a man and leave “Standing Black Woman of Venice” right there where it is.
“Monumentale: The Bronzes” will be exhibited at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation through February 5, 2023.
