Born in the port city of San Francisco on November 2, 1938, Richard Serra grew up with the clang of metal and the spectacle of ship launches — a childhood soundtrack that later echoed through his steel monuments.
Born in the port city of San Francisco on November 2, 1938, Richard Serra grew up with the clang of metal and the spectacle of ship launches — a childhood soundtrack that later echoed through his steel monuments.
October 24, 2025
Born in the port city of San Francisco on November 2, 1938, Richard Serra grew up with the clang of metal and the spectacle of ship launches — a childhood soundtrack that later echoed through his steel monuments.
Came from a humble beginning, Richard Serra had to work extra hours to pay his way through UC Santa Barbara and Yale. After brutal shifts in steel mills, including Bethlehem Steel, he had absorbed all the industrial know-hows that would later become useful in his art career.
Richard Serra had a “Verb List”, a two-sheet work on paper — now in MoMA’s collection, where he jotted 84 action infinitives and 24 “conditions/contexts”. He called them “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process,” and used the list as a studio compass for early works with lead, rubber, and steel. These experiments later evolved into his trademark large, site-specific sculptures. Typical entries include short prompts like “to roll, to crease, to fold, to bend …,” which he would literally test on materials to see what new forms and behaviors emerged.
Serra’s life intertwined with artists and scholars, first in marriage to sculptor Nancy Graves (1965–1970) and later to art historian Clara Weyergraf-Serra (from 1981), whose collaboration on publications and exhibitions helped frame the rigorous, no-nonsense ethic that defined both the man and the work.
His breakthroughs are now landmarks. The Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) pioneered leaning, curving corridors that recalibrate your stride.
The Matter of Time (1994–2005) at the Guggenheim Bilbao expands that idea into spirals and ellipses you navigate like a maze.
Richard Serra’s Sequence (2006) is a monumental steel sculpture — widely regarded as one of the artist’s greatest achievements, composed of twelve interlocking weathering-steel plates that together weigh approximately 235 tons. Installed at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus, the work invites visitors to walk through its sinuous corridors, where curving walls tighten and open to create a constantly shifting sense of space, form, and perspective..
London’s Fulcrum (1987) stacks plates into a precarious vertical, the removed Tilted Arc (1981–89) remains a touchstone for debates on public art.
In Qatar, Serra scales the horizon. 7 (2011), rising in Doha’s MIA Park like a steel minaret, stacks slender plates into a quiet vertical that calibrates wind, light, and the city’s shoreline.
Out in the Brouq desert, East-West/West-East (2014) stretches four colossal weathering-steel plates across miles of gypsum flats, fixing an invisible axis between cliffs and sea.
