31 Oct PERSPECTIVE: TRANSFORMING SPACES INTO EXPERIENCES: RICHARD SERRA [1938–2024]

He was still a kid, just 16 or 17, when Richard Serra spent an afternoon at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s North Beach. The future artist was working in a steel mill to put himself through school at the time. He used his fake ID to get into the jazz club so he could listen to Charles Mingus and have a drink. It was the middle of the afternoon; a fan whirred. A loud fan, Serra remembered. Mingus was recording his set, and when a bartender turned off the fan mid-song, Mingus went apoplectic. “He just went completely crazy,” Serra said in a 2001 Art21 documentary. “He jumped over the bar, and he practically throttled the guy, and he said, ‘That fan was one of my instruments.’” The moment stayed with Serra, shaped him even. “… It made me think, as someone who wanted to be an artist, that you had to pay attention all the time to everything that was going on because everything [has] potential use if you could see its potential.”

Indeed, Serra’s body of work is a paean to potential, a pinnacle of post-Abstract Expressionist and post-Minimalist sculpture, a representation of the process by which art was transformed from passive to participatory. He would go on to become one of the 20th century’s most important sculptors; an iconoclast who sued the U.S. Government, sparking debates about site-specificity and the moral rights of artists; and an inspiration to artists of every genre, from architects and painters to dancers and filmmakers, who share his lived philosophy that true art is neither utilitarian nor practical and that its beauty, if you will, art’s purpose, is in the viewer’s individual experience.

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938, one of three sons to a Russian-Jewish mother from Odessa and a Spanish father from the island of Majorca. His father, Tony Serra, worked as a pipefitter in a shipyard, and on his middle son’s fourth birthday, he took Richard to see a giant oil tanker launch to sea. Watching what he would later describe as the curve of the ship’s massive steel hull cutting through the water with a seemingly impossible lightness and speed became another defining moment in shaping the future artist’s thinking. “All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory,” Serra once said. He began drawing then, and his talent drew recognition by the time the boy was in third grade. 

Serra earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied under Margaret Mead and Aldous Huxley, among others, still working summers at steel mills. He continued to study painting and was advised by Modernist painter Howard Warshaw to think about art school. Serra left the West Coast to study art history and painting at Yale, where after completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art, he won a Fulbright Scholarship that took him to Paris to paint in the early 1960s. There, Serra spent his nights in bars hoping to catch a glimpse of painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti [1901– 1966] and his days in the studio of sculptor Constantin Brancusi [1876–1957], at once a place of creation and exhibition, and a work of art in its own right.

But it wasn’t until Serra went to Spain and saw Velásquez’s famous portrait Las Meninas that he realized he could no longer limit himself to painting. He saw in the painting that the viewer is necessarily an extension of the work, that the viewer’s experience becomes the art. “I had not seen anything like it before, and it made me think about art, and about what I was doing, in a radically different way,” he said in an interview with The Guardian decades later.

After this aha moment at the Prado in Madrid in 1964, Serra explored art with a new feverishness. He made installation art using stuffed and live animals, and in 1966, he made sculptures using such nontraditional materials as fiberglass and rubber. By the late 1960s, after producing his well-known Verb List on paper, a handwritten list of 84 infinitives and 24 possessives, which implied process and recalled the writing on elementary school chalkboards, Serra began what is now known as his mature work.

In 1969, he began his Splash series with the first of his metal sculptures. Often considered an homage to Jackson Pollock’s active art making and the ancient art of bronze casting, Serra used molten lead cast into the junctures between the floor and wall. He would remove the hardened lead and exhibit them as long, textured sculptures. From there, he created work by balancing solid metal plates using weight and gravity rather than mechanical joinery, including One Ton Prop (House of Cards). He used his familiarity with steel to use the metal in a way that hadn’t been done.

In 1981, Serra installed one of his most controversial if not best-known works, Tilted Arc, in the plaza of a New York City federal building. The 12-foot-high and 120-foot-long wall of curved steel cut through the plaza and interrupted people’s ability to walk a straight line from one side to the other. Employees of the building and neighbors were incensed. He resisted calls for its removal for several years and endured various hearings, lawsuits, and appeals, arguing that to remove such a site-specific work would be to destroy it. In the end, a jury from the National Endowment for the Arts voted to cut the work into three pieces and remove it. But Serra’s place in the art world was only strengthened by both the magnitude of the work and the controversy surrounding it.

With Tilted Arc and subsequent works, Serra dove ever deeper into the relationships between the site, the work, and the viewer, moving away from straight lines and right angles into the land of curvature, spirals, and ellipses. “They hadn’t seen that before,” Serra said years later. “Modernism was a right angle; the whole 20th century was a right angle.” But such works as Snake and The Matter of Time for Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Torqued Ellipse for the Dia Art Foundation in New York deepened Serra’s questions about and interest in the viewers’ relationships to space and the spaces created by the work.

The point was for viewers to discover the sculptures in the same way Serra had imagined them, by “walking and looking.” His sculptures of rolled oxidized steel became environments that people could walk in and through. His inspiration, in part, came from a Guggenheim Fellowship to Japan in 1970, where he visited myriad Zen gardens and wanted to recreate, in his own fashion, an experience where each object relates to objects around it rather than being autonomous components.

Such can be said of Serra’s work installed posthumously at Tippet Rise Art Center near Fishtail, Montana. Crossroads II, consisting of four solid 8-inch-thick plates of steel of varying lengths, sits on a prow of volcanic rock at the meeting point of two trails overlooking vast canyons, ridges, and grasslands in the shadow of the Beartooth Mountains. It is set intentionally so that hikers and bikers at Tippet Rise can literally stumble upon it. Serra’s work joins large-scale installations on the 12,500-acre property by such artists as Alexander Calder, Wendy Red Star, and Ai Weiwei, among others. “We see the sculptures at Tippet Rise as portals into a wonderland of quantum dislocations, into new ways of seeing and seeing ourselves,” says Peter Halstead, who founded Tippet Rise with his wife Cathy, echoing Serra’s own philosophy.

The Halsteads worked with David Collens, director emeritus at Storm King Art Center in New York, and Tippet Rise co-director Pete Hinmon “in measuring and then sculpting the plateau in accordance with Richard Serra’s minute instructions, and evaluated many sites before agreeing that the final location evoked viscerally and spiritually a place which we all felt would have been one of Serra’s favorite locations, in the way that it creates both identity and isolation,” said Halstead.

After his death in March 2024 at 85, Serra is remembered for more than his striking and monumental sculptures. His body of work spans decades and genres — from paintings, drawings, and film to his most well-known sculptures in museums and landscapes around the globe. And his beliefs about art forming environments to be walked in, around, and through continue to influence ideas and works from urban planners and architects to dancers and sculptors alike.

Carter Walker is a writer and editor in Montana’s Horseshoe Hills. The next edition of her guidebook, Moon Montana and Wyoming, will be released in the spring of 2025.