His mom, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Odessa, was dedicated to studying and to seeing that her sons succeeded.
Mr. Serra drew incessantly from an early age — partially, he admitted, to compete for his mother and father’ consideration together with his sensible, athletic older brother, Tony. Impressed by his drawings, his third-grade instructor instructed his mom to take him to museums. She started introducing him to folks as an artist.
Tony Serra would change into a lawyer well-known for his left-wing views, for a vow of poverty he took and for defending Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, and members of the novel group the Symbionese Liberation Military. (The 2 brothers didn’t converse for 25 years, however Richard Serra ultimately helped pay for the school bills of Tony’s 5 youngsters.)
After one yr on the College of California, Berkeley, the place he joined the progressive College students for a Democratic Society, Mr. Serra transferred to the College of California, Santa Barbara, which he remembered as small and really aggressive, “with lots of verbal sparring backwards and forwards.” He took programs there with Margaret Mead, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and majored in English literature whereas learning artwork with the painters Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun.
He was planning to proceed his literary research in graduate faculty when Mr. Warshaw instructed him he ought to take into consideration making use of to an artwork faculty. Mr. Serra despatched a gaggle of drawings to Yale and acquired a scholarship. His classmates there included Mr. Shut, the painters Brice Marden (who died in August) and Rackstraw Downes, and the sculptor Nancy Graves, who turned his girlfriend. Amongst his lecturers, he was particularly influenced by the painter Philip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman. He later described the big work he made at Yale as “knockoff Pollock-de Koonings.”
A Yale journey fellowship adopted by a Fulbright grant allowed him to spend two years in Europe with Ms. Graves, who additionally acquired a Fulbright. They married in 1964 in Paris, the place they turned pleasant with the composer Philip Glass. In Florence, Italy, after his Velazquez epiphany in Madrid, Mr. Serra started making assemblages that concerned stuffed and dwelling animals in cages. His first solo present, titled “Reside Animal Habitats,” happened at Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966.
