Who

Renowned sculptor Serra is the man behind those massive, abstract steel sculptures you've seen on college campuses and in public squares.

Backstory

Born in San Francisco to a Spanish father and a Russian Jewish mother, Serra worked in a steel factory—portentously, it would transpire—to pay for grad school at Yale, where his classmates included Chuck Close and Brice Marden. After graduating with an MFA in 1964, Serra headed to Paris and Florence, where he says he moved from painting to sculpture after seeing works by Duchamp and Picasso. He returned to the States in 1966, falling in with artists like Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson (whose famed "Spiral Jetty" Serra helped execute in 1970). It was in the mid-60s that Serra began experimenting with using metal in his artwork and in 1968, he exhibited a molten lead performance-sculpture called Splashing in a warehouse procured by Leo Castelli. The critically acclaimed show led to Serra's first major sculpture commission: three 60-foot-long steel plates placed at precisely calibrated angles, installed on the grounds of publisher/art collector Joseph Pulitzer's house outside St. Louis. Over the following three decades, the scale of Serra's work has grown along with his reputation, and now his gargantuan yet minimalist steel sculptures grace public spaces all over the U.S.

Of note

Serra recently enjoyed a huge burst of publicity, thanks to his 2007 MoMA retrospective, "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years." The show mainly featured Serra's late-career work, including colossal, serpentine pieces like Torqued Ellipse IV. Of course, Serra doesn't exactly create the sort of work collectors can easily pick up and place in their living room—his pieces can weigh up to 20 tons, and even the construction of the new MoMA had to account for the weight of Serra's work on the second floor—although if you're rich enough to be buying his art, you can probably create a space to accommodate it. The National Gallery of Art in Washington paid $4.5 million in 2001 for Serra's 1971 sculpture Five Plates, Two Poles. Private collectors include Aby Rosen, Len Riggio, Francois Pinault, Sheldon Solow, and Larry Gagosian, who both represents him and owns a Serra sculpture which sits in the front yard of his East Hampton manse.

For the record

Serra is a longtime close friend and collaborator of architect Frank Gehry. The Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Bilbao features Serra's eight massive steel curves, The Matter of Time.

Drama

In 1981, Serra installed a 120-foot long, 12-foot high sculpture called Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, but employees who worked in the building complained that it blocked the entrance, forcing them to walk around it. Eventually, a committee voted in favor of removing it, but Serra fought back, suing the government and arguing that the installation was site-specific and couldn't be relocated. Serra eventually lost the case and on the evening of March 15, 1989, workers cut the sculpture up and hauled it away to a government warehouse in Maryland.

Personal

He's married to Clara Weyergraf-Serra. In addition to their home and studio in Tribeca, the couple owns a renovated farmhouse in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. They recently purchased several properties in the small village of Orient on the North Fork of Long Island, where they've hired art-world architect Richard Gluckman to build a home/studio space.

No joke

Serra appears in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3. He plays an architect who has his jaw replaced with metal.