33 Facts About Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud was born on June 26,1939 and is an American and French visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet.

Barbara Chase-Riboud was suspended from her middle school after being accused, mistakenly, of plagiarizing her poem "Autumn Leaves".

Barbara Chase-Riboud continued her training at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art.

Barbara Chase-Riboud is the first African-American woman to have received the MFA degree from Yale University.

Barbara Chase-Riboud has worked across a variety of media throughout her long career.

Barbara Chase-Riboud created her first direct wax-casting sculptures while at the American Academy in Rome in 1957 on a John Hay Whitney fellowship.

In 1971, Barbara Chase-Riboud was featured along with four other contemporaries in Five, a documentary about African-American artists.

The segment on Barbara Chase-Riboud showed her installation in 1970 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in addition to the artist working in her studio.

In 1996, Barbara Chase-Riboud was among artists commissioned for artwork at the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan.

Barbara Chase-Riboud wrote a poem with the same name as the sculpture.

Barbara Chase-Riboud's work was featured in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.

Barbara Chase-Riboud's work is in major corporate collections and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Geigy Foundation, New York; and Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles.

Barbara Chase-Riboud has received numerous honors for her literary work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award.

Barbara Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Sally Hemings.

Barbara Chase-Riboud has continued her literary exploration into the enslavement and exploitation of African people with her subsequent novels.

In 1994, Barbara Chase-Riboud published The President's Daughter, a work that continued the Sally Hemings story, by imagining the life of her and Jefferson's mixed-race daughter Harriet Hemings; she and all the children were seven-eighths European or white by ancestry.

Barbara Chase-Riboud settled in Washington, DC where her brother Beverley had already settled.

Barbara Chase-Riboud married a white man, according to her letters to her brother Madison Hemings.

In 1979, Barbara Chase-Riboud gained widespread attention and critical acclaim for her writing with her first novel Sally Hemings.

Barbara Chase-Riboud was the first writer to present a fully realized, fictional character of Sally Hemings, with a rich interior life.

Barbara Chase-Riboud's book became an international bestseller, selling more than one million hardcover books, and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction by an American woman.

Barbara Chase-Riboud explored the intricate relationships between the Hemings's and Jefferson families.

In place of civic myths that deny America's mixed-race beginnings, Barbara Chase-Riboud turns to the Hemings family to unveil the historical presence of antebellum interracial relationships and the possibilities of a post-civil rights multiracial community.

In 1991, Barbara Chase-Riboud won an important copyright decision, Granville Burgess vs Barbara Chase-Riboud.

Barbara Chase-Riboud had filed suit against the playwright of Dusky Sally in 1987, shortly before a production was to open at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

Barbara Chase-Riboud said his work infringed on her copyright for her novel Sally Hemings because it borrowed her fictional ideas.

In 1997, Barbara Chase-Riboud settled a suit against DreamWorks for $10 million on charges of copyright infringement of her novel about the Amistad mutiny, Echo of Lions.

Barbara Chase-Riboud did not recuse himself from the suit, but had Punch Productions dropped from the original complaint.

When Barbara Chase-Riboud filed a second suit against DreamWorks in France, the dispute was quickly settled out of court for an undisclosed amount days before the 1998 Oscar nominations were announced.

In 1994, Barbara Chase-Riboud published Roman Egyptien, poetry written in French.

Barbara Chase-Riboud contributed the poem "Ode to My Grandfather at the Somme 1918" to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

In 1981, Barbara Chase-Riboud married her second husband, Sergio Tosi, an art publisher and expert.

Barbara Chase-Riboud is a dual citizen of the United States and France.