Richard Serra

Born in San Francisco in 1938, the son of a pipefitter, he grew up watching steel tankers and worked in steel mills to fund his studies before earning a fine arts degree from Yale. He is known for large-scale site-specific sculptures in weathering steel whose massive curving forms compel viewers into bodily engagement with space and material. His 1981 work Tilted Arc, a 120-foot curved steel wall installed at Federal Plaza in New York, provoked a protracted public controversy and was removed and destroyed in 1989. He died in March 2024, having reshaped the definition of sculpture for over five decades.