SFMOMA, Part 18: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. The Well of the Concubine Pearl (Barbara Chase-Riboud, 1967).
Almost seven feet tall, and it doesn't touch the ground the way sculpture is supposed to. The Well of the Concubine Pearl rises like a column — polished aluminum above, silk and wool and linen cascading below, a steel chain with a lock worked into the fibers — and the whole thing stands on the floor without a pedestal, the way a body stands, the way a ritual object stands. Barbara Chase-Riboud called this "freedom from the tyranny of the base," and she meant the base as the entire Western sculptural convention: the plinth, the pedestal, the object set apart. Her sculptures meet the floor directly. They don't sit on history. They stand in it.
The work memorializes Consort Zhen (1876–1900), the favorite concubine of China's Guangxu Emperor — "Concubine Pearl" — renowned for her intelligence, executed on Empress Dowager Cixi's orders in 1900, drowned in a well in the Forbidden City on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. Chase-Riboud made it in 1967, shortly after a 1965 trip to China with her then-husband, the Magnum photographer Marc Riboud — a trip on which, by her account, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic since the 1949 revolution. She visited the actual well. She came home and built a monument out of metal and silk. It is one of the earliest works in which she combined the two — among the first statements of the language that would define her career — and one of her only works to incorporate found objects: the chain, the lock. SFMOMA acquired it in 2023, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim, by exchange. It is the first Chase-Riboud in the museum's collection. She is eighty-six. The work is fifty-eight. "New to the collection" has never sounded so much like an indictment.
The sculpture is a stele that isn't a stele, a monument to a woman the official histories tried to erase, by an artist who has spent sixty years writing erased Black women back into the record. Chase-Riboud is also a poet and a novelist — her Sally Hemings (1979) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, sold over a million copies, and was vindicated when DNA evidence confirmed the Jefferson–Hemings relationship two decades later. (CBS killed a planned miniseries after historians objected; the DNA didn't care.) Her Pulitzer guide quotes a poem she dedicated to Consort Zhen: "love rustles like gray silk in the palace." The fibers in the sculpture are that line, made physical.
The paradoxical transfer of power
"In the early pieces, I had used bronze in a fluid, liquid way, while the wool was static. So, there was this paradoxical transfer of power from the bronze to the silk or wool." That's Chase-Riboud on her own method, and it's the whole argument in a sentence. The metal — hard, heavy, masculine, the material of monuments — is worked until it flows. The fiber — soft, domestic, feminine, the material of craft — is knotted until it holds the metal up. Hard becomes soft. The support becomes the crown. In 1967, in the all-male canon of minimalism, pairing polished aluminum with silk and wool was a provocation aimed directly at the industrial purists. Judd's stacks don't have curtains. Flavin's fluorescents don't wear silk.
But the deeper reference isn't minimalism at all. Scholars link the vertical fiber-metal structure to West African masquerades — wooden mask superstructures joined with fabric and raffia — and to the funerary steles she saw in China and Cambodia, which directly inspired the Malcolm X steles she began in 1969. The Well is the formal precursor: the column family, the fiber-metal breakthrough, before history gave her the subject. What she's building is not a minimalist object. It's a reliquary. A shrine. A thing that stands the way sacred things stand — on the ground, among people, without a pedestal to keep you at a distance.
Bronze doesn't burn
Her father was a contractor who painted. He told her he'd burned his paintings — there was no point in allowing them to exist. Her response, decades later: "Bronze doesn't burn."
That's the biography in four words. Born 1939 in Philadelphia. At fifteen, her woodcut Reba was shown at Carnegie Hall and purchased by MoMA — before she'd finished high school. BFA from Temple; Whitney fellowship to Rome, where she cast her first bronzes and traveled to Egypt; MFA from Yale in 1960, the first Black woman to earn one. Paris since 1961 — sixty-four years — studio on rue Blomet, friends with Giacometti and Calder and Baldwin, represented by Betty Parsons from 1970. She showed at Dakar in 1966 and Algiers in 1969, the Black Arts Movement years, but built her career at a remove, in abstraction, in France. The American art world took its time. The 2022 Pulitzer survey was called the largest monographic exhibition of her career thus far — at eighty-three. The eight-museum Paris celebration in 2024 was described as a first for any living artist. The reassessment arrived. It always arrives late for the women who left.
The Well sits at the hinge of all of it: the China trip, the fiber breakthrough, the stele form, the memorial impulse. A concubine drowned in a well for having political influence. A Black American woman in Paris, building her a monument out of aluminum and silk. The chain and the lock — found objects, the only ones in the piece — are the bluntest symbols in her entire oeuvre, and she never used them again. Some things you only need to say once.
So here's the thesis: The Well of the Concubine Pearl is a monument built from the materials monuments aren't supposed to use, for a woman monuments weren't supposed to remember, by an artist the monuments took sixty years to notice. The polished aluminum says permanence — bronze doesn't burn. The silk says the opposite — everything soft gets cut. The sculpture holds both truths at once, standing on the floor without a base, refusing the pedestal and everything it stands for. Chase-Riboud wanted freedom from the tyranny of the base. She got it. The museum took half a century to catch up. The well was always there. 🌁
Timeline — Barbara Chase-Riboud
1939 — born June 26, Philadelphia
1954 — woodcut Reba purchased by MoMA, age fifteen
1960 — MFA, Yale; first Black woman to earn one
1961 — moves to Paris; stays sixty-four years
1965 — first American woman to visit the PRC since 1949; sees the Well of Concubine Zhen
1967 — makes The Well of the Concubine Pearl; the fiber-metal breakthrough
1969 — begins the Malcolm X steles
1979 — novel Sally Hemings wins the Kafka Prize
1998 — Africa Rising, 18-foot bronze, African Burial Ground National Monument
2023 — SFMOMA acquires The Well of the Concubine Pearl; first in the collection
2024 — eight-museum Paris celebration, a first for any living artist