In 1957, Barbara Chase-Riboud set sail across the Atlantic on what she calls a “paquet boat” named Le Flandre. So began the grand adventure that has defined the artist and writer’s life for nearly seven decades: While a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, she worked for Cineiettà, the storied Italian film studio. She traveled across continents, mounted the Pyramids, and, in ’65, became the first woman from the US to visit China since the revolution 16 years prior. In the introduction to her recent epistolary memoir, I Always Knew, Chase-Riboud writes, “These letters are about travel, about adventure, about humor and love but they are above all about identity. About becoming and still being left intact.”

Chase-Riboud was precocious. “As a child, success came easily to me,” she writes. Born in Philadelphia in ’39, she began art classes at age seven. In ’55, she won a competition put on by Seventeen to have a woodcut exhibited. Called Reba, it depicted a woman in a dress and heels holding herself against a green imprint of wood grain. It was acquired by MoMA shortly after. Chase-Riboud remains the youngest artist to have been collected by the museum. In ’58, a photo of her grasping a canvas while sitting on a Roman bridge became the cover of the April issue of Ebony.

Today Chase-Riboud is probably best known for her large-scale abstract bronze sculptures. Often these works speak directly to history—as is the case with her Malcom X steles (begun in 1969), Africa Rising (1998), a 15.5-foot monument commissioned for the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan and displayed at the Ted Weiss Federal Building, and her more recent odes to Josephine Baker, which drape silk from winding armatures. She also works on the scale of the page: I Always Knew is her 10th book, joining an oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that includes the bestselling historical novel Sally Hemmings, about Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved mistress. She has a practice of drawing automatically with charcoal, a largely private exercise, as well as a series begun in 1996 titled Monument Drawings, which combines gestural language with sketches of speculative sculptures. Over the past several decades, Chase-Riboud has also created a subtly three-dimensional form of wall-works: silk threads pierced through Arches paper. Often, these evocative white-on-white forms carry titles from her own poetry, like Bewitched by your own nautical surfaces or And everything shone without the sun.

To try to account for her life’s work in a few short paragraphs is an insurmountable task, but those in Paris this autumn will have the luck to experience some of it in an eight-institution retrospective titled Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released. Amid the collections of museums like the Louvre and the d’Orsay, the exhibition will be an invitation to see how Chase-Riboud has not only narrated but shaped history.

The sound of cascading coins, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches.

Drew Zeiba: When I first saw your silk drawings on the wall at Hauser and Wirth last year, and hadn’t yet read about what they were, I immediately thought of them as poems. There was something about the gesture on what I’ll call the page that seemed to have something to do with the act of writing, but also the act of reading. When I learned you were a poet, memoirist, and novelist, it made perfect sense to me. How do you think of these silk drawings in relation to writing?

Barbara Chase-Riboud: They are poems. They are poems that have deep meaning, which I don’t even note the meaning of because, as I’m doing them, I’m not transferring what’s in my head to the paper. I’m transferring what’s in my hand to the paper. It’s all gestural.

And then the poetry just comes or doesn’t. I mean, there are drawings that are not poems, but there are a lot of them that are strictly literary.

Drew: Strictly literary in what sense?

Barbara: In the sense of automatic writing. There is a line of drawings that are charcoal black drawings with automatic writing, which resemble the white drawings that are not even done in the same manner. It closes the circle between the beginning, the poetic drawings with the automatic writing, and then the white drawings with the automatic penetration. The black drawings are all linear, but the white drawings are all sculptural, if you see what I mean.

“The eye is what has to build the monument. All I can do is trace the outlines.”

Drew: They move in space in a very literal way. You move through the page, but then they also move beyond when you knot it back.

Barbara: What do you think?

Drew: I’m thinking now of the colors. Charcoal, of course, has a charcoal color, and with the silk drawings, you’ve chosen to do white on white.

Barbara: Not only is it white on white, but it is white with a certain sculptural presence as well. So there’s this kind of game between the flatness of the white paper and the roundness, really, of the poems, since they emerge from the paper. And they emerge from the paper automatically because I am not thinking of poetry when I’m doing them. I’m just doing them.

Drew: Is this process—the automatic drawing or writing—related to how you compose your poems you’ve published in books such as From Memphis & Peking and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra?

Barbara: Absolutely not.

Drew: I didn’t think so.

Barbara: There’s nothing automatic about my written poetry. It’s thought out to the last point. To the last period. The poems are architectural. That’s how I look at them. That’s how I make them. They have walls. They have the roof. They have stairways.

Drew: Somewhere I read that you had spent time studying architecture…

Barbara: I was the first lady to graduate from the Yale School of Architecture and Design some 40 years ago, or however long ago it was. And, at the same time, I broke the color barrier as well. My basic studies were architectural. Before that, I went to the rather classical Tyler School of Fine Arts [at Temple University], which was more European. But in order to draw, I had to go to medical school. How I learned how to draw was by taking medical and anatomy classes at a university. I don’t know whether any of the scientific contemplations of the human body came into or come into my automatic [charcoal] drawings. I don’t know. Maybe they do, or maybe they don’t. No one will ever know because no one will see them.

Drew: Are the way you’re thinking through the human body or the human form and the way you’re thinking through the built form related?

Barbara: I think so, yes. I couldn’t make the kind of sculpture I make if I wasn’t an architect. My thoughts are of materiality. And once I’ve got that settled, then comes the poetic part, but the poetic part comes after the materiality. For me, poetry is structure more than anything else.

I usually say, ‘Well, I can sculpt what I can’t write, and I can write what I can’t sculpt,’ but that’s a really primitive way of expressing it. It’s much more complicated than that.

Left: Bewitched by your own nautical surfaces I, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches. Right: Bewitched by your own nautical surfaces II, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches.

Drew: They don’t feel so divorced, maybe, the writing and sculpture? Or do you think of them as very distinct endeavors?

Barbara: It’s a different state of mind, and it’s a different state of soul, really. It doesn’t mean that I get up in the morning, write a poem, and then run downstairs and make a sculpture. I don’t do that. I would be crazy if I tried.

Things come in waves of different kinds of mental activity. The drawings usually come in series of 20 or 30 all done at the same time in a short period of time. And the sculptures, it’s exactly the opposite. I can stop making sculpture for a year—and I have done that. Simply stop and go on to other things, or go on to writing.

I’ve written six novels, all of which took more than a year. One took three years, and of course one took 38 years. But the latest book is an autobiography, and it is I Always Knew. It’s the letters that I wrote to my mother from Europe. She lived all her life in Philadelphia. And when I decided that I was going to stay in Europe—out of not only affection and love and sort of beauty, but to amuse her—I would just write letters about what I was doing in my life. I had no intention of publishing them at all. I had no pretensions of this being a diary or this being a travelogue. No. They were just gossip letters to my adored mother.

At a certain time, and this was very recent, somebody took those letters, put them in chronological order, and said, ‘This is a memoir.’ And when I read, it was like reading about another person. First of all, who was this little girl? And what did she think she was doing? My hair stood up on my head when I realized what she had done and the things that she had accomplished in life. It’s just come out in France. We’ll see what happens.

Drew: You described yourself in the third person throughout that response.

Barbara: Well, I read it as a third person reading about a character in a novel. That’s what that is—for me anyway. And so, we come back again to the idea of automatic writing. How much are the drawings based on my subconscious? I will never know because now I have the letters. I know what was going through my head when I was doing this.

Malcolm I / The voice we still hear, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches.

Drew: Maybe this is a silly question—but if the drawings are automatic, how do you know when to stop?

Barbara: The drawing tells me when to stop. Just like the sculpture tells me when to stop. They say, ‘You’re finished, Barbara. Stop. Please, don’t put another fingerprint.’ Or they will say, ‘Barbara, this is a big mistake. Just tear it up.’

Drew: With the sculpture, you work with thin layers of wax that you can build and cut into before it’s cast, is that right?

Barbara: Exactly. And since I cast in bronze, the wax takes on another characteristic because, for example, the sculptors who work in metal cannot do what I do in wax—and I can do impossible things with metal, but they have to begin in wax. So that technique has a lot to do with the end result too.

Drew: For people making large-scale sculptures, as you do, but in aluminum or steel, the material often expresses itself directly. You can’t feel the hand in the same way.

Barbara: You feel the machine, but you cannot feel the hand. It’s only wax which is so pliable that your fingerprint will remain in it. Then, when it’s cast in bronze, it takes on a whole other situation. A whole other existence.

Drew: This way of working returns me to scale. I saw the sculptures and the white drawings exhibited together in The Three Josephines. I felt a really interesting tension in how my body was relating to each of those scales at once. Moving between them both to look, and them speaking through the room to each other. How do the scales between the drawings and the sculptures relate to one another?

Barbara: I’m interested in your body. I’m interested in your reaction to the fact that there are monuments which, in your imagination, have to be 10 meters or 15 meters high. But since it’s only one dimension, you can compress all that. The eye is what has to build the monument. All I can do is trace the outlines. I can’t do any more than that. The rest is your own imagination.

And I think that the white drawings are exactly the opposite. Each hieroglyph is a little story and a little tiny architecture, and they just sweep across the page so that you are much freer to navigate the white drawings than you are for the black drawings.

Left: A 46,000 year-old worm I, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches. Right: A 46,000 year-old worm II, 2023, silk on Arches paper, 29.875 x 22.5 inches.

Drew: Where do the titles come from?

Barbara: Mostly from lines for my own poetry, but I name the drawings after they’re finished. And the drawings stand alone without any title. If I don’t use my own poetry, then I just leave them untitled, but I’m not illustrating the poem with the drawing. I never do that. I’ve never done that, and I will never do it. I’ll never make a sculpture of Sally Hemmings.

Drew: Because you’ve already explored that in the novel?

Barbara: Because I’ve already made the sculpture in the book. It is not only a sculpture but a piece of architecture. As I said, that’s how I build my novels. The historical novels took a lot of time, effort, and research. And I fell in love with historical research. I would spend years on these books because there were two things going on: There was the architecture of the book, and then there was the architecture in my mind, and somehow I had to come to some kind of conclusion about it. My books are extremely well written and well researched, and it is almost a search for perfection. The drawings are also a search for perfection. I never redraw anything. If I make a mistake, then that’s too bad for me.