Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi.

I'm at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where there's an exhibition of the work of the

renowned American artist Barbara Chase Rebu. Her work is on display in museums around the world,

and she's also an award-winning poet and novelist. During her long career, she's been fascinated by public monuments

and her edifices and memorials honor various historical and cultural figures.

But how should society deal with the commemoration of controversial figures from the past?

Barbara Chase Rebu, welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

We're sitting here at a major exhibition of your work called Infinite Folds.

And you started your artistic training at the age of seven.

How on earth did you know at that early age that you wanted to become an artist?

I didn't know I wanted to be an artist.

It was my mother and my grandmother who decided that I was going to have something to do with the arts.

They weren't quite sure what.

You were 16 and you were the youngest person to ever have a work acquired by MoMA,

the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was of Rieba, which was a woodcut print of a young

girl with a plant next to her. And you have said that success as a child came easily to me and that I grew up as a confident, curious child,

not willing to settle for anything but the best. Were you always very ambitious from an early age?

I wouldn't call it ambitious. I didn't know what it was. I knew that I wanted to do something,

you know, significant, but I had no idea what, and I didn't,

had no idea how. And I had no concept of the world, except my little family, which is very small.

You know, it was, it was very intimate. And it seemed to me that the world was intimate too.

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