The History of Disability in Art - Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The History of Disability in Art

Barbara Chase-Riboud

American (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1939)

Barbara Chase-Riboud is known as a sculptor and a writer, most notably for her novel Sally Hemings (1979). In college, she earned a fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome where she made bronze sculpture and exhibited her work. She also traveled to Egypt during this time where she became inspired by non-Western art. After returning back to the United States, she earned her M.F.A. from Yale University, becoming one of the first African American women to receive an M.F.A. from the university. Her abstract sculptures often explore soft and hard materials such as silk and other textiles in contrast to metals of bronze and aluminum. An example of her combined material sculptures is Malcolm X Steles. Chase-Riboud continues to create drawings and sculptures that have been exhibited and collected by museums today.

Zanzibar #3, ca. 1972

BARBARA DEWAYNE CHASE-RIBOUD (American, born 1939), Zanzibar #3, ca. 1972, bronze with silk (rope tassels), 12 1/2 in. x 13 1/2 in. x 13 1/2 in. (31.75 cm x 34.29 cm x 34.29 cm), Bequest of William H. Alexander, 2003.11.24. © Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Dewayne Chase-Riboud (American, born 1939)

bronze with silk (rope tassels)

12 1/2 in. x 13 1/2 in. x 13 1/2 in. (31.75 cm x 34.29 cm x 34.29 cm)

Bequest of William H. Alexander, 2003.11.24. © Barbara Chase-Riboud

A visual artist, poet, novelist, and sculptor, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s body of work has been described by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as a “protest against forgetting.” Zanzibar #3 is no exception. For more than five decades, Chase-Riboud has created monumental abstract forms with a deep and nuanced understanding of history, identity, and sense of place. Evocative of an elaborate headdress, Zanzibar #3 is one of at least six known works in a series named after the East African island in the Indian Ocean that was a hub for the Arab slave trade, which thrived from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Her Zanzibar series was inspired by her poem “Why Did We Leave Zanzibar?” (1969-1970), which meditates on the consequences of the slave trade and enslaved people’s history of resistance. One verse reads:

Why did we leave Zanzibar?

Sweet fragrant mango-stenched beach,

Breasts pressed flat against steamed sand,

Seeping through sieve-like flesh,

Carrying carats of ancestor dust,

Rattling like pearls in oyster shells.

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine

Bowdoin College Museum of Art