A sculptor, draughtswoman, poet and novelist, Barbara Chase-Riboud counts among the major artists of the previous decades. Though well-known in the United States, she is underrecognized in France, where she has lived and worked since 1961.

Her visual work, which always occupies a space between the abstract and the figurative, unfolds across a range of mediums including bronze, textile, drawing and writing. Although never overtly illustrative of it, her work is full of explicit and implicit references to the history of the African diaspora, from the transatlantic slave trade to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. She encodes numerous evocations of this history into her pieces, paying homage to its great figures, including Malcolm X and Josephine Baker.

Everytime A Knot is Undone A God is Released presents a selection of her most recent works, including bronze sculptures from the Standing Black Woman of Venice series. It also features a number of works embroidered on paper with white thread: these near-illegible texts offer a delicate evocation of her literary oeuvre, which will also be present in the exhibition through a listening room where her writing will be read by multiple voices.

With this exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo is joining a collective, nationwide celebration of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s oeuvre that has been devised in conversation with Donatien Grau and Erin Gilbert, in collaboration with seven other Parisian institutions: the Centre Pompidou, the Musée National des arts Asiatiques – Guimet, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the Cité de la Musique, and the Philharmonie de Paris.