Richard Serra. Tilted Arc Defense Fund Poster, published by Leo Castelli Gallery, 1985

Item #: NCMA081

Tilted Arc Defense Fund Poster, published by Leo Castelli Gallery, 1985 by Richard Serra

Photo: Anne Chauvet

First-edition offset lithograph on paper, edition 500

38 x 22 1/2 Inches (unframed)

Donation

Richard Serra is an American artist widely known for his very large, self-supporting minimalist sculptures, often of weathered sheet steel. Tilted Arc was a controversial public art installation dis-played in Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan from 1981 to 1989. The art work consisted of a 120-foot-long, 12-foothigh solid, unfinished plate of rust-covered COR-TEN steel.

In 1981, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) commissioned Serra to create a sculpture to be installed in the plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. Serra designed a massive, linear sheet of steel that leaned ever so slightly, becoming a tilted plane. From an abstract aesthetic viewpoint, it was a masterful gesture. Not only was it formally pleasing, it brought Modernism up to date with conversations about materiality, ephemerality, site-specificity, and the intersection of art and public life. For the people who lived and worked around the plaza, however, it was a nightmare. The sculpture blocked their path between buildings. It cast a shadow on them while they were eating lunch. It blocked their view of the fountain.

For Serra, Tilted Arc embodied his interest in the ability of an artwork to be specifically fitted to a location in way that caused it to interact directly, and intimately, with viewers. Serra had argued in his various appeals that since “Tilted Arc” was designed specifically for the plaza where it was in-stalled, moving it to literally any other location would render it meaningless, essentially destroying it. Despite the solid logic of this argument, a number of judges ruled against Serra. Following appeals, the sculpture was destroyed in 1989.

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. English Literature in 1961. Serra helped support himself by working in steel mills, strongly influencing 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 took inspiration from the artists who taught there, including Philip Guston, composer Morton Feldman, and painter Josef Albers. While at Yale, Serra proofed Albers’s book Interaction of Color (1963). 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. 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. At one point, to fund his art, Serra started a furniture-removals business, Low-Rate Movers, and employed Chuck Close, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and others.

-FB