Under-Recognized Artists Who Got Their Due in 2022
Barbara Chase-Riboud
For decades, Barbara Chase-Riboud has been creating sculptures dedicated to giants of Black history, from civil rights activist Malcolm X to Sarah Baartman, whose body was put on display in 19th-century Europe. These sculptures are abstract, so they cannot be said to depict these people outright, but Chase-Riboud has described them as monuments anyhow, and what glorious, beautiful statues they are.
Although Chase-Riboud’s unusual fusion of the Baroque art’s maximalism and high modernism’s formalism has gained her many fans over the years, it wasn’t until 2022 that she had her first retrospective, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. That show is currently on view, as is a more modest but no less important survey at the Serpentine Galleries. Meanwhile, Chase-Riboud’s memoir, which comes mainly in the form of letters sent to her mother over the years, was published this year by the Pulitzer and Princeton University Press.
