Malcolm X at 100: Transformational Leader and Outspoken Orator Inspired Artworks by Jack Whitten and Barbara Chase-Riboud

Malcolm X reading an article about the Nation of Islam written and photographed by Gordon Parks that was published in the May 31, 1963, edition of Life magazine. The man behind Malcolm holds a newspaper reporting on the shooting of seven unarmed Black men by Los Angeles police. | Photo: Robert Flora/Corbis

 

MALCOLM X (1925-1965) WAS BORN A CENTURY AGO on May 19, 1925. To mark his centennial, Culture Type is exploring how artists Jack Whitten (1939-2018) and Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939) have interpreted and been inspired by the transformational leader and outspoken orator.

Focusing on civil rights, human rights, and racial justice, Malcolm X was an extraordinary voice for change. Over the years, many artists across disciplines have buoyed the legend and lessons of Malcolm X.

His friend Gordon Parks (1912-2006), photographed him for Life magazine. Actor Ossie Davis (1917-2005), another friend, eulogized Malcolm at his funeral. He concluded: “And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own Black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.” Filmmaker Spike Lee dramatized the powerful life story of Malcolm X in a three-hour, Oscar-nominated biopic starring Denzel Washington.

Glenn Ligon and Henry Taylor painted portraits of Malcolm. The title of AfriCOBRA artist Wadsworth Jarrell‘s portrait, “Black Prince” (1971), references Davis’s eulogy. Cameroon-born photographer Samuel Fasso recreated a famous profile image of Malcolm for his “African Spirits” (2008) series, which pays tribute to prominent Black history figures. Key lines from The Ballot or the Bullet, a poignant, much-heralded speech Malcolm delivered in Cleveland and Detroit in 1964, informed “Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy),” a series of abstracted, text-based paintings made by Adam Pendleton.

Also working in abstraction, Whitten and Chase-Riboud have memorialized Malcolm X and broadened the lens on his evolving perspectives on race and humanity and unwavering fight for the rights and justice of Black people. Both born in 1939, the artists were only 25 years old when Malcolm X was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. (Malcolm was young too, just 39.)

His deeply affective “personage,” a term Chase-Riboud has used, motivated each artist to make profound works in his name. She paid homage with an expansive series of monumental sculptures that speaks to Malcolm’s strength and complexity. Whitten’s work homes in on similar characteristics. He “was not as one-dimensional as people try to make him be,” the artist said:

 

Installation view of “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y. (March 23-August 2, 2025. Shown, in foreground, “Homage To Malcolm” (1965). | Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy MoMA

 

Barbara Chase-Riboud at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, Mo. The Pulitzer presented “Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes” (Sept. 16, 2022-Feb. 5, 2023), the largest monographic exhibition of the artist to date, including six Malcolm X sculptures displayed in the main gallery. Shown with “Malcolm X #13” (2008), right foreground, and “Mao’s Organ” (2007), left background. | 2022 © Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pulitzer Arts Foundaton

 

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD (b. 1939)

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD’S UNIQUE SCULPTURAL WORKS are studies in contrast, combining elegant, architectural cast bronze forms with cascading fiber skirts composed of silk wool. Malcolm X is the first historic figure the artist memorialized. Cleopatra, Alexander Pushkin, and Josephine Baker, among others, inspired later works.

Chase-Riboud is a writer and artist, who trained as an architect. “I was a poet who got caught up in the manufacture of objects. That’s me,” she said in a 2023 Hauser & Wirth video. Born in Philadelphia, Pa., Chase-Riboud has been based in Paris since 1961 and today splits her time between the French capital and Rome, Italy.

She first paid tribute to Malcolm X in 1969, after attending the Pan African Cultural Festival in Algiers the same year. The sculpture was created for an exhibition called “7 américains de Paris” at Galerie Air France in New York. Over five decades, she has made 20 sculptures dedicated to Malcolm. The monumental works are informed by funerary steles the artist came across in North Africa, China, and the Soviet Union.

Chase-Riboud produced the striking sculptures in black, red, or gold, regal palettes befitting an iconic figure Davis described as royalty in his eulogy.

“I realized that my sculpture had changed into non-poetic abstraction. I had to get rid of the legs, I had to get rid of the base. And as soon as I applied the wool and the fabric, I got rid of the tyranny of the base, magic happened and everything came together,” Chase-Riboud said in the video.

“I decided to do the ‘Malcolm Steles’ because I was very upset when he was assassinated. This was, historically speaking, a tremendous man. The ‘Malcolms’ combined the light of metal and the softness of fabric in a kind of convection that was impossible except that it happened. And once this transformation had come about, the rest was very easy. The rest was just practice.”

“I decided to do the ‘Malcolm Steles’ because I was very upset when he was assassinated. This was, historically speaking, a tremendous man. The ‘Malcolms’ combined the light of metal and the softness of fabric in a kind of convection that was impossible except that it happened.”
— Barbara Chase-Riboud

 

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD, “Malcolm X #16,” 2016 (bronze with red patina, silk, wool, polished cotton and synthetic fibers with steel support, 233.7 x 81.3 x 76.2 cm / 92 x 32 x 30 inches). | © Barbara Chase-Riboud. Photo: Lucia Momoh/Jeffrey Johnston

 

Installation view of “Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds,” Serpentine North, Serpentine Galleries, London (Oct. 11, 2022-April 10, 2023). Shown, far left in foreground, “Malcolm X #2” (1969).| © Barbara Chase-Riboud 2022. Photo: © Jo Underhill, Courtesy Serpentine

 

Selections from the Malcolm X series have been included in various exhibitions over the years. More recently, examples have appeared in surveys of the artist at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Mo., and Serpentine Galleries in London.

Last fall, Paris celebrated Chase-Riboud’s longstanding career with an exhibition spread across eight major museums—including the Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée du Quai Branly, and Palais de Tokyo—a first for a living artist. A landmark event, “Barbara Chase-Riboud. Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” featured sculpture, drawings, and poetry, dating from 1958 to present. Her Malcolm X work was among the highlights at Centre Pompidou.

Several presentations have focused specifically on the Malcolm X sculptures. In 1970, the first four works in the series were on view at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York along with other sculptures and jewelry pieces. The same year, Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge staged “Monuments to Malcolm X,” which also featured the first four sculptures. At the time of these two shows, the four sculptures represented the entire body of work.

“Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles” was a survey exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013-14) and the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2014). Five Malcolm X sculptures were exhibited in conversation with other sculpture and two series of drawings from the 1960s and 1996-97.

In 2017, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presented “Barbara Chase-Riboud – Malcolm X: Complete,” which featured 14 Malcolm X works, including the final seven, newly produced works that completed the series of 20.

The press release that accompanied the Michael Rosenfeld exhibition provided a timeline for the production of the series. Chase-Riboud produced Malcolm X #1-4 in 1969. More than three decades passed before she expanded the body of work. In 2003, Chase-Riboud made four more (#5-8) and #9-13 were finished in 2007 and 2008. The remaining works (#14-20) were realized in 2016 and 2017.

“The series began in the 70s. The first steles were made in 1969 and at a certain point I dedicated them to the memory of Malcolm X,” Chase-Riboud said in a 2013 Philadelphia Museum of Art video. “This posed a lot of controversy and problems with the naming of this series but I think that that the problem has been solved by now. Malcolm himself has become a world figure and an historical figure and these steles are really part of part of a kind of world tradition of naming steles after historical personages.”

 

On the occasion of “Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Sept. 14, 2013–Jan. 20, 2014), the artist discussed Malcolm X #13 and motivation for dedicating the sculpture series to the civil and human rights leader. | Video by Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

Jack Whitten walks through “Soul of a Nation” at Tate Modern in London and talks about his work, including the painting “Homage to Malcolm” (1970). | Video by Tate Modern

 

JACK WHITTEN (1939-2018)

JACK WHITTEN MEMORIALIZED KEY ARTISTS, musicians, and cultural figures in his work, including Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Ellison, Betty Carter, Duke Ellington, W.E.B Du Bois, Barbara Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X.

The New York artist was born in segregated Bessemer, Ala., and came of age at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Known as an abstract painter, Whitten also made sculptures throughout his career, however they were never the focus of an exhibition in his lifetime. A survey of his sculptures was shown for the first time posthumously.

(The museum exhibition “Jack Whitten: Odyssey: Sculpture 1963–2017” toured the Baltimore Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 2018-19.)

Whitten paid homage to Malcolm in both mediums—painting and sculpture. He spoke about his painting “Homage to Malcolm” (1970) when it was on view in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” in 2017 at Tate Modern in London:

“The painting for Malcolm, that’s symbolic abstraction. That painting was done right after the assassination. Malcolm X had a grasp of the universal aspect of the struggle that he was involved with. He knew that. It’s that conversion into the universal that gave him more power,” Whitten said in the Tate video.

The most fitting way symbolic was to go back to the classical symbol of the triangle to offer that sense of strength. That painting had to be dark. It had to be moody. It had to be deep. It had to give you that feeling of going deep down into something and in doing that I was able to capture the essence of what Malcolm was about.”

“Malcolm X had a grasp of the universal aspect of the struggle that he was involved with. He knew that. It’s that conversion into the universal that gave him more power. The most fitting way, symbolic, was to go back to the classical symbol of the triangle to offer that sense of strength.”
— Jack Whitten

 

JACK WHITTEN, “Homage to Malcolm,” 1970 (acrylic on canvas, 100.5 x 119.5 inches / 255.3 × 303.5 cm). | The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. © Jack Whitten Estate, Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth, Photo by Christopher Burke Studio

 

JACK WHITTEN (American, 1939–2018), “Homage To Malcolm,” 1965 (partly stained American elm, coiled wire, nails, and mixed media, 17 × 75 × 13 inches / 43.2 × 190.5 × 33 cm). | © Jack Whitten Estate. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2019

 

In 1965, the same year Malcolm X was assassinated, Whitten produced a mixed-media sculpture with stained elm wood, which is also titled “Homage to Malcolm.” Audio produced by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York* includes insight from Whitten about the memorial sculpture:

It’s stained for Blackness. You see the back with all of the stuck-in pieces there? That’s rough stuff. Very rough stuff. The horn section smooths out, becomes very smooth. That middle section is built that way that it provides a middle ground. It has different stages of touch in it. So it’s an instrument of time, built in three sections—sort of connects the past with the present. That’s what that piece is.

Malcolm was not as one-dimensional as people try to make him be. Man had many stages to his personality. It’s another example of white folks trying to squeeze Black people into one-dimensional people. But we’re not that.

Whitten, who lived and worked in Queens, N.Y., the last two decades of his life, spent summers in Crete. He began going to the Greek island in 1969, four years after had made his Malcolm X sculpture.

Inspired by his appreciation for African sculpture and introduction to ancient Cycladic and Minoane work from the region, the change of environment pushed his work in new directions. Whitten continued to develop his sculptural practice during his time in Crete, working a variety of materials including wood, marble, stone, copper, bone, fishing wire, and meaningful personal objects.

Both of the artist’s Malcolm X works are currently on view in “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” (March 23-Aug. 2, 2025), the first full-scale retrospective of the artist at MoMA in New York. CT

 

* The Jack Whitten audio MoMA produced for his sculpture “Homage to Malcolm” (1965) is based on archival audio courtesy of The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, and the Baltimore Museum of Art’s exhibition Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture

 

“Jack Whitten: The Messenger” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from March 23-Aug. 2, 2025

“Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Josephines” is on view at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Monaco, from March 6-June 14, 2025

 

Curator Katy Siegel co-organized “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017,” the first exhibition of the artist’s sculptures. In this video, Siegel discusses “Homage to Malcolm” (1965). | Video by Baltimore Museum of Art

 

BOOKSHELF
Several recent books document the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud. “Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes” was published on the occasion of the artist’s recent exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis, Mo. “Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds” is the catalog for her exhibition at Serpentine Galleries in London. Published in 2022, “I Always Knew: A Memoir” explores Chase-Riboud’s extraordinary, large-than-life story. An earlier volume, “Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles” accompanied the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” accompanies the artist’s current Museum of Modern Art exhibition. “Jack Whitten: Odyssey: Sculpture 1963–2017” coincided with the first presentation of Whitten’s sculptural works (including “Homage to Malcolm”) and “Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed” explores the artist’s studio practice through his notes, interviews and other documentation. “Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting” documents the artist’s first-ever career-spanning survey. Finally, “Jack Whitten,” a monograph from Prestel, “conceived with Whitten’s collaboration,” explores the artist’s work, focusing in particular on “the themes of history, politics, science, and music.” Also consider, “The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America” by journalist Mark Whitaker, which was published earlier this month in anticipation of Malcolm X’s centennial.