She was born in Philly and made a career in France, but don’t call artist Barbara Chase-Riboud an expat

NEW YORK — As one of the few people alive who has talked to the late Josephine Baker, world-renowned author, artist, and native Philadelphian Barbara Chase-Riboud breathes rare air.

And she’s quite aware of it. Almost 50 years later, Chase-Riboud, 84, is still blown away by that long-ago encounter, her excitement reverberating throughout Soho’s Hauser & Wirth art gallery on a recent Tuesday morning as she explains her latest work, The Three Josephines, to a handful of art connoisseurs. Her voice cracks with age, yet the audience still strains to hear the gems she is dropping.

It becomes clear that Chase-Riboud, who sculpted The Three Josephines in honor of Baker, the early 20th-century dancer and French spy, lived a life just as remarkable as her muse. Chase-Riboud sailed to France in 1957 to study art, never to live in the United States again. As one of the world’s most accomplished artists, her work resides in modern art museums in London, Paris, New York, and Philadelphia (at the Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Woodmere Art Museum).

The Three Josephines — two black, one red — are massively beautiful pieces. Shaped like hulking construction cranes. Their vibe, however, is divine, the effect of yards of silk extending from the top of the sculptures to their bases like a flowing toga covering a woman in the throes of a dramatic performance. One Josephine represents Baker as the hopeful young woman who lived on the same Paris street Chase-Riboud did, albeit decades apart. Another Josephine reminded Chase-Riboud of the 68-year-old Baker, who Chase-Riboud met at Baker’s final performance. That Josephine was a goddess.

The third in the grouping captures Baker’s posthumous grandeur as one of five women — and the only Black woman — to be honored as a national hero of France in the Panthéon in Paris. “She was the epitome of Blacks in Paris and [embodies] the history of Blacks in the States,” Chase-Riboud said. “These sculptures are my manifesto to her.”

Well aware of the burden of being a Black woman in America, Chase-Riboud left the country more than a decade before Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were murdered. Her book, Sally Hemings: A Novel, which won the Franz Kafka Prize, fictionalized the relationship between Hemings and her enslaver Thomas Jefferson, shining a light on the consensual (and nonconsensual) couplings between the enslaved and enslavers. Chase-Riboud wrote six acclaimed books, including the 2022 memoir, I Always Knew, a story of her life abroad as told through 30 years of letters written to her mother, Vivian Mae Chase, who lived in Philadelphia until her death in 1991.

The Three Josephines follows two landmark museum exhibitions, “Barbara Chase-Riboud Infinite Folds” in London’s Serpentine Galleries as well as a joint show with Alberto Giacometti at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

When we meet at Hauser & Wirth, Chase-Riboud is wearing all black, peering through bangs that kiss the top of her nose like a mysterious French woman. Yes, she still loves making art. Yes, she loves her hometown. And she was all grace until I referred to her as an “expat.” Then it got real Philly, real fast.

Answers have been edited for clarity.

I began in Philadelphia. I was 7 years old when I started taking children’s art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I saw a Degas painting of ballerina and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to make something like that. As a child I went to Rittenhouse Square and sat on the little bronze goat practically every day. I was as young as 3 years old. Now, 80 years later, I’m still sitting on a piece of bronze.

First of all, never use the word expatriate with me. I don’t recognize it. It has everything to do with opinion and nothing to do with reality. I don’t consider myself an expatriate and I don’t consider myself particularly American either. I do consider myself a citizen of the world. Philadelphia fits into my history, but I didn’t expatriate myself from anything, and certainly not from Philadelphia.

My mother spent the rest of her life in Philadelphia, so there will always be a strong connection to Philadelphia in the house I grew up in, a three-story home at the corner of 15th and Waverly. She’s buried at Eden Cemetery (the oldest Black-owned cemetery in the United States, located in Collingdale) like everyone else. We corresponded for 30 years and I told her everything, creating a bond so strong that I didn’t realize it until I realized the 600 letters I’d written her that I found after she died. I didn’t save one letter [she wrote me]. But her voice is on every page in the book and she emerged as this extraordinary woman who impacted my life and my work. For that reason, Philadelphia will always be important to me.

My life took on another dimension. After Temple, I went to Yale. Then I went to Europe and that changed everything. I was from Philadelphia, but I was no longer of Philadelphia.

That’s a silly question. We aren’t talking about freedom. We aren’t talking about politics. We are talking about beauty and artistic expression. However, I love being an alien, a stranger, an immigrant; there is freedom in that that is extraordinary. I can be from anywhere. This is a freedom that very few people have as artists and I have. It hasn’t been easy. But I have that.

“The Three Josephines” is on display at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster St., Manhattan, through Dec. 23.