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Concept
Richard Serra
Summary
Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site. Since the mid-1960s, Serra has worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his large-scale steel works.
Serra was born in San Francisco, California to Tony and Gladys Serra – the second of three sons. His father was Spanish from Mallorca and mother was Russian, in Odessa. From a young age, he was encouraged to draw by his mother. The young Serra would carry a small notebook for his sketches and his mother would introduce her son as "Richard the artist." His father worked as a pipe fitter for a shipyard near San Francisco. Serra recounts a memory of a visit to the shipyard to see a boat launch when he was four years old. He watched as the ship transformed from an enormous weight to a buoyant, floating structure and notes that: "All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory."
Serra studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara and graduating in 1961 with a BA in English Literature. In Santa Barbara, Serra met the muralists, Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw. Both were in the Art Department and took Serra under their wing. During this time, Serra worked in steel mills to earn a living.
Serra studied painting at Yale University and graduated with both a BA in Art History and an MFA in 1964. Fellow Yale alumni include Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downs, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold. At Yale Serra met visiting artists from the New York School such as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella.
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