Home
Press Release:
Richard Serra received his MFA from Yale University in 1964, after which he spent a year in Paris and Florence funded by a Yale Traveling Fellowship and a Fulbright grant. His early work, drawn from the experience of working in steel mills and shipyards, focused on industrial materials. In an iconic early work Serra threw molten refried beans against the walls of his studio. Though casts were eventually created from the impact, the emphasis of the piece was on its process. Since those Minimalist beginnings, the physicality of Serra’s work has become compounded by breathtaking weight and size. His series, “Torta Ellipses” (1996–99), is comprised of gigantic plates of towering steel—bent and curved, leaning in and out.
Richard Serra in an important Latino artist, a grouping of collaborative works by Josh Rios and Anthony Romero opened 2014 November at Art in These Times. The exhibition ran through February 2015.
The title of this exhibition is based on a list of top 10 important Latino Artists. If you do not considered Richard Serra to be a Latino artist, you are probably not alone. I still have no idea why his name got on such a list. Well, there is some logic to it, his father was born in Spain. Surely this is not what constitutes Latin American art. This was bothersome. So here you have it; an exhibition that is nothing like a Richard Serra sculpture, that is not about abstract formal monumentality in a hierarchical way, but about lateral forms of memory and monument emerging from vernacular Mexican-origin practices and aesthetics.
