Now Showing: The Artist at Work

Barbara Chase-Riboud apologizes about the tedious pace of constructing one of her sculptures. No theatrical flourishes here, flinging gobs of clay or chunks of metal onto a pedestal. Creating a Chase-Riboud is a slow, incremental process, something like building a nest.

“Little by little, you begin to have something that looks like a sculpture, I hope,” she says.

This is in a paint-spattered studio at Pasadena City College, where Chase-Riboud was serving last week as the art department’s fourth annual Artist in Residence. The sculptor spent much of her residency cutting strips of wax, shaping them into whorls and painstakingly fitting them onto a board, the sum of which would ultimately be cast in bronze.

On the busy Pasadena campus, the yearly Artist in Residence program has become the art world equivalent of a “star turn”--like Katharine Hepburn performing a cameo role in an ensemble production or Pavarotti stepping out of the audience to sing a brief aria.

A famous artist lectures on art, exhibits works in the College Art Gallery, socializes on the wine-and-cheese circuit and, in the allotted week, creates a new work of art--all within the confines of a bustling suburban campus.

For Chase-Riboud, it was exhilarating. “I’m having a great time,” said the Philadelphia-born sculptor, an exotic-looking woman with jutting cheekbones and hair cascading down her back.

Students and faculty clustered around her in the studio, circling her work-in-progress like tourists at a bazaar and lobbing questions at her. Does she have set hours to work? “No set hours,” she said, continuing unflappably to shape her strips of wax. Does she try to express some kind of a philosophy of art? “Not while I’m working.”

Who’s her audience?

“Some consider my work more European than American,” she said. “But the Europeans consider it quite American.”

Chase-Riboud, 50, is not only a widely admired artist whose monumental constructions of bronze shards, woven silk and hammered aluminum are in the permanent collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; she is also a respected historical novelist.

Her books include “Sally Hemings,” the story of Thomas Jefferson’s mulatto lover, which won the Kafka Award for the best novel written by an American woman in 1979 and sent waves of controversy through some staid academic circles. Her most recent book was last year’s “Echo of Lions,” the story of a shipboard slave rebellion, also based on historical fact. She has also written poetry, winning the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize in 1988.

Students were particularly curious about the connections between her writing and her art.

The writing was an unexpected development, Chase-Riboud confesses. She sort of backed into it. “I never took a course in any kind of literature,” she says. “I’m the worst speller in the world. It was really sheer chutzpah. “

But she found the tale of the Founding Father and the slave woman, first revealed in Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson, so compelling that she was drawn inexorably into writing a book.

“It’s one of the most fantastic American love stories,” she says. “I tried to convince numerous writer friends to do it. Finally, (novelist) Toni Morrison told me, ‘Instead of going around asking other people to write the novel, why don’t you just do it yourself?’ ”

The novel allowed her to explore her own theories about arbitrary racial distinctions in America, which she once described as a “mulatto country.”

And it introduced her to a new, more demanding medium, she says. “There’s something terribly healthy about sculpture,” she says. “It’s very fundamental. You build something. You look at it. It’s finished. But a book is never finished.”

With books, there are publicity tours, translations, continuing controversies, movie rights (both “Sally Hemings” and “Echo of Lions” have been optioned by Motown Productions). “You never even really sell a book,” Chase-Riboud says. “You just give someone else the right to print what you’ve written.”

It seemed inevitable back in Philadelphia that Chase-Riboud would land somewhere in the arts. With dance classes when she was 5, piano lessons at 6 and art lessons at 7, she describes herself as a prime “art brat.”

Her father was a frustrated architect, her mother a medical technician. Chase-Riboud won scholarships to the Tyler Art School at Temple University and the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she earned a master’s in fine arts in 1960.

She always yearned to travel, to escape the pedestrian precincts of her hometown. “Maybe it was Philadelphia,” she says. “I remember as a little girl looking out the window, saying, ‘If I could only get out of Philadelphia.’ ”

Her first travel adventure came as a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellow in Rome. Some friends dared her to accompany them on a trip to Egypt, then they abandoned her on the waterfront in Alexandria. “It was a matter of: Do I turn back now or go on?”

She elected to go on, staying for three months with an American diplomat and his family in Cairo and visiting all of the Egyptian monuments. It was a historic experience, she says, giving her new confidence as an Afro-American artist and introducing lasting elements into her sculpture.

“The power, the elegance and sophistication of Egyptian art, the monumentality of it--after that, Greek and Roman art looked like pastry,” she says.

Chase-Riboud moved permanently to Europe in 1960, marrying French photographer-journalist Marc Riboud in 1961. They were married for 20 years and had two sons before they divorced. For the last nine years, she has been married to Italian art dealer Sergio Tosi.

She splits her time between Paris and Rome, where her studio in the Palazzo Ricci is reputedly the same one used by 16th-Century goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.

And she continues her traveling ways. “I’ll go anywhere, with any excuse whatsoever,” she says.

In 1965, she was one of the first American women to travel in the People’s Republic of China, and she has traveled extensively in Africa.

Despite her literary accomplishments, Chase-Riboud takes pains to keep “literary” elements out of her art. Her sculpture pieces are abstractions, she insists, offering viewers a kind of Rorschach test of their own points of view. One viewer last week, apparently unable to get over the artist’s blackness, interpreted all of her works as depictions of slavery.

“He said it was all that black material,” Chase-Riboud recounted. “ ‘This is definitely slavery,’ he said. ‘It’s definitely in the air.’ He went home with a very peculiar impression of the show.”

She worries that America is fading as a great art center. While American artists are moving in large numbers to Europe, she says, the United States art scene is becoming a “supermarket for the rich,” with investors trading in art as a commodity.

In her sculptures, Chase-Riboud uses a propane torch, a hot plate and some carving tools, including a kitchen knife. She slices the wax with a hot knife or melts the edges with the torch. “We’re working extremely spontaneously,” she says, “extremely freely.”

A student persists in asking her about her philosophy of art. “It’s hard to verbalize,” she says. “If artists could verbalize, they’d write.” She pauses for a moment, apparently remembering that she is indeed a writer.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s the beauty of the object,” she says. “The poetry and the mystery.”