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Stranded in Egypt
In 1957, on Christmas Barbara's friends left her stranded in Egypt, it was a life changing expirience for her. A man and his family took her in and she later married him. She found out that there was such thing s non-European art work. That she could not only express herself through her cultural beliefs, but others as well. -
Finding the beauty in art
If "beauty" can be called "black" in the same way that honor can be called "black," then Zanzibar can be described as such. There is a mysterious and not far from threatening underbelly to this "beautiful" surface which has the same emotional effect as some African sculptures have on Westerners--and for the same reasons; displaced in time and space, taken out of their real environment, they assume a certain impenetrability that can disconcert and repel as well as please and attract -
New Art Work
Barbara began to employ bricolage as well as ancient lost-wax casting techniques and African symbols in her work. The combination of these formal concerns with modem materials and contemporary events was developed in her Malcolm X series of 1969-1970 and expanded exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Four Monuments to Malcolm X" in 1970. Rather than make political art, She pays tribute to the struggle of the 1960s with elegiac elegance. -
New Art Work
She declares, "Sculpture should be beautiful, each element has an aesthetic as well as a symbolic and spiritual function. My idea is to reinterpret the aesthetic function in contemporary terms, using modern materials". Her sculptures are powerful studies in contrasts-unyielding metals supported by braided, knotted, and wrapped fibers that interchange functions. The soft wool and silk become hard and the rigid bronze and steel seem to dissolve into softness. -
Writing career
In recent years Barbara's creative output has centered more on writing than the visual arts. Her first book of poems, From Memphis to Peking, published in 1974, was inspired both by her visits to Egypt and to the People's Republic of China. With the unifying theme of physical and spiritual journeys, it focuses on the writer's family origins and the quest for mystical knowledge.