I always knew : a memoir

Title:

I always knew : a memoir / Barbara Chase-Riboud

Author:

Chase-Riboud, Barbara

Resource Type:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

Princeton; Oxford : Princeton University Press : in association with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, [2022]

Description:

xii, 416 pages, 44 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm.

Summary:

"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 Onassis, and her first historical novel, Sally Hemings (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.""-- Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic Note:

Includes index.

Source of Acquisition:

Gift of Marieluise Hessel.

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