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"American artist, poet, and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939), has had an unusually varied and highly successful career across genres and media. As a poet, her work was edited by Toni Morrison and she is a recipient of the Carl Sandburg Prize. As a fiction writer, she was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis, and her first historical novel, Sally Hemmings (1979) was a bestseller. But Chase-Riboud trained as a visual artist, primarily as a sculptor, and her large installations made of fabric and bronze are powerful, with references to the human figure, her travels in North Africa and China, and the American Civil Rights Movement. She and Bettye Saar were the first African-American women to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art, and her work is in many major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou. This book, framed as a memoir, is composed of over forty years' worth of letters Chase-Riboud wrote to her beloved mother, and which she found in her mother's house around the time of her death. The letters begin in 1957, while the artist was a student in Paris, and continue through 1991. As Chase-Riboud writes in the introduction, "This is not autobiography, nor biography, nor memoir nor fiction but a strange hybrid mixture of disparate and even contradictory narratives out of which portraits of the two of us emerge, separate yet united and indivisible."--
About the author
Barbara Chase-Riboud is a visual artist and sculptor, novelist, and poet. She is the author of six novels, including
Sally Hemings and
The Great Mrs. Elias, and three poetry collections. She is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the French Légion d’Honneur in 2022. She lives in Paris and Rome.
Summary
The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved mother
Barbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale’s School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries—from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker.
I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia.
By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.
Additional text
"cinematic, effervescent, and charming"---Nika Elder, Women's Art Journal
