Richard SERRA

Serra was born in San Francisco, the second of three sons.^[1][2] His father was a Spanish native of Mallorca who worked as a candy factory foreman and in steel mills.^[3] Serra described the San Francisco shipyard where his father worked as a pipefitter as an important influence on his work: "All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory which has become a recurring dream."^[4] His mother, Gladys Feinberg, was born in Los Angeles to Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa^[5][6][7][8] and later worked as a housewife.^[9]

Serra studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with a B.A. in the subject in 1961.^[10][11][12] At UCSB, he studied art with Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun. Serra helped support himself by working in steel mills, labor that strongly influenced his later work. He studied painting in the M.F.A. program at the Yale School of Art between 1961 and 1964. Fellow Yale alumni of the 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Janet Fish, and Sylvia and Robert Mangold. Serra has said he has taken most of his inspiration from the artists who taught there, including Philip Guston, composer Morton Feldman, and painter Josef Albers.^[2]

While at Yale, Serra proofed Albers's book Interaction of Color (1963).^[13] In 1964, after he received his M.F.A., he was awarded a traveling fellowship from Yale and went to Paris. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship the following year in Florence.^[14] Since then he has lived in New York. In New York, his circle of friends has included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson.^[15] At one point, to fund his art, Serra started a furniture-removals business, Low-Rate Movers,^[2] and employed Chuck Close, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and others.^[16]