Africa Rising II, presented for the first time to the French public from May 22 to September 10, 2025, in the Jardin des Tuileries, is the new version of the monumental sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud originally conceived in 1997 to commemorate the four hundred African Americans whose remains were discovered in Manhattan beneath Wall Street. The American-French sculptor, born in 1939 in Philadelphia and living in Paris since 1961, revisits her historic monument by making it accessible, far from the security restrictions that had confined the New York version inside a protected federal building. The work, cast in bronze using the lost-wax technique and enriched with fiber inserts, rises in the Parisian garden evoking a primordial and ancestral energy - a winged figure that merges the power of the Winged Victory of Samothrace with the sweeping biomorphic forms that define the artist’s material language. Africa Rising II is not merely a reedition: it is a furious, regenerated evolution - a figure emerging from the tragedy of enslaved humanity to become a symbol of redemption, beauty, and transcendence. The sculpture appears at a pivotal moment in Chase-Riboud’s career, which in recent years has seen a major retrospective in Paris, spread across eight prominent institutions - including the Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Orsay, and Palais de Tokyo - with the aim of showcasing and integrating her hybrid production that fuses sculpture, poetry, and literary narrative. Under the aegis of the Louvre, the installation of Africa Rising II in the garden marks an emotional milestone: a public and accessible artwork capable of connecting visitors to a collective memory of sorrow and hope. Three decades after its first appearance, the sculptural form now gains new symbolic density, reinforcing Chase-Riboud’s commitment to telling stories often denied or ignored, which in her work channel historical experience, literary plots, silenced voices, and poetic resonance. Africa Rising II is not a funerary monument, but a monument to resilience - an ark of collective history that invites us to look into the wound of memory to find beauty, energy, and moral awakening.
