Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud, born in 1939 in Philadelphia, is an American and French sculptor, novelist and poet, and the first African-American woman to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University. Her sculptures pair cast bronze and aluminum abstract forms with veils of silk and wool rope, standing as tall as ten feet. She is equally known as a novelist, most famously for Sally Hemings, a 1979 fictional account of the enslaved woman's relationship with Thomas Jefferson that won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.