Malcom X #17, 2016

Bronze and silk
© Barbara Chase-Riboud. Photo by Alex Marks.

Over a prodigious career spanning five decades, Barbara Chase-Riboud has used technical expertise and material experimentation to produce a unique, audacious body of abstract sculpture. The sculptures for which she is perhaps best known are those dedicated to the assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X (1925–1965), which she produced from 1969 to 2016. Envisaged as funerary steles, the works are not intended to represent the deceased or his political struggle in any literal way. Instead, the artist said she made them “in memoriam” of a “historical icon whose life radiated far beyond the politics of the temporal.” Malcolm X #17 has a gold patina, which Chase-Riboud chose to add reflectivity and illumination, rather than the black patina of most of the series. Fundamentally, Malcolm X #17 is an object that celebrates light, movement, and material union.