Sculptor Finds Nesting Place at School

Barbara Chase-Riboud apologizes about the how long it takes to build 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.

In a paint-spattered studio at Pasadena City College, Chase-Riboud started 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 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.

Famous artist lectures on art, exhibits her works in the College Art Gallery, socializes on the wine-and-cheese circuit and, in the allotted week, creates a new work of art.

“I’m having a great time,” said the Philadelphia-born sculptor.

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 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 mixed-race 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.

The writing was an unexpected development, Chase-Riboud confesses: “I never took a course in any kind of literature. 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.”