Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia and trained in art and architecture at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, the American Academy in Rome, and Yale University. After receiving her M.F.A. from Yale, she moved to Paris, where she quickly garnered attention for her abstract, surrealist figural sculptures and drawings. In 1969 Chase-Riboud began her groundbreaking series of Malcolm X sculptures, in which she combines undulating cast bronze forms with knotted and braided fiber elements. The imposing sculptures, named in memory of the assassinated civil rights leader, set material and thematic opposites into dynamic interaction—bronze and silk; fixed and flowing; hard and soft; brash and hushed; monumental and intimate.