After the procedure continued for several days, Serra realized the task was meant to make both father and son feel better about one another—and that he would have moved that sand anywhere. This autopoietic account summarizes one of Serra’s most important contributions to the history of art: to recast sculpture as a single action carried through until completion, while probing the relation between form and action, as well as what it takes to initiate action. The last part he most explicitly addressed in film and video works (1968–79) that looked at the physiology of muscle reflex and the structures of communication systems, mass media, social justice, and labor organizing.

Much later, in 2001, Serra’s artwork was the first to enter Dia Beacon, when the former Nabisco factory building was undergoing transformation into a museum in Upstate New York. Interior partitions were built around his sculptures, and a spiraling sequence of galleries devoted to Serra was designed to offer a variety of spatial experiences.

Vast volumes bathed in natural light are the norm at Dia Beacon, but walls closely frame the eight Serras on view. Two intimately sized rooms host Scatter Piece (1967) and Elevational Wedge (2001). For the first work, Serra poured hot rubber into pliable strips that are scattered on the floor around a taut line of string suspended some eight inches off the ground. The imaginary plane that the string conjures is a reminder of the fact that there is no such thing as an action in a vacuum—that casting sculpture is always a kind of relational performance. The tension between form and action returns in Elevational Wedge, a perplexing piece for which the floor was slanted downward in relation to an inclined sheet of steel that looks like a ramp even though it remains level with the rest of the ground. Look up from there and your eye meets a window framing the top of Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), a sculpture in which curved plates of steel, one concave and the other convex, rest on each other while calling to mind both the bow and the sail of a ship squeezed into the architecture. Close to that is Consequence (2003), a two-part wall-size drawing that plays with mass in relation to placement.

The sequence of Serra’s works culminates five steps down, in what was once the factory’s loading station. That’s where three many-ton Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) and the equally imposing 2000 (2000) quietly unfurl in a row. Dia Art Foundation commissioned the Ellipses in the mid-1990s and first showed them in an exhibition that opened in Chelsea in 1997. The twisting structures gave Serra the opportunity to work with a new sculptural form that provokes a constantly revolving, involuting experience. They continue to astonish viewers decades later—and surely will for many decades to come. Their scale is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own. Whenever I walk visitors through them, the effect is invariably one of disoriented awe.  

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator, and curatorial department co-head at Dia Art Foundation.

Serra produced Clara-Clara for a 1983 retrospective at Paris’ Centre Pompidou. The installation consists of two 118-feet-long and 12-feet-high steel structures weighing 216,000 pounds; the pair curve away from one another to form a walkway.

The piece was installed in the public Tuileries Garden between the Jeu de Paume and the Musée de l’Orangerie after organizers of the exhibition deemed it too heavy to be installed indoors.

In 1985, two years after the exhibition, the city of Paris acquired Clara-Clara and relocated the piece to the smaller Parc de Choisy, located in the city’s thirteenth arrondissement. The sculpture did not fare well at the park: It was defaced with graffiti and damaged from visitors using the steel surface recreationally. To Serra’s dismay, Paris officials deinstalled it again in 1993, this time storing it out of sight.

It was pulled from storage for the first time in 2008 for display in the second edition of Monumenta, a contemporary art exhibition held at the Grand Palais in Paris. For the 2008 edition, Serra was commissioned to create another monumental sculpture, titled Promenande, that was situated in the historic building. The occasion reignited the debate of where in Paris to install Serra’s large-scale; in May of that year, Serra told the New York Times, that he wasn’t what Parisian officials would do with Clara-Clara after the exhibition ended.

Clara-Clara is currently held at the Fonds Municipaux d’Art Contemporain (FMAC), which manages the city’s collection of over 23,000 works of art and oversees restorations, according to Hyperallergic, which reported on the status of the sculpture’s location earlier this month.

It entered the city’s facility in 2010 after Monumenta. It had first been located at the storage center, a former water plant in Ivry-sur-Seine in Southeast Paris, by Columbia professor, Michelle Young, while she was conducting research.

At the end of March, Aurélien Véron, a member of the Groupe Changer Paris, a municipal right-wing opposition group, asked on X, “What future can be reserved for such a major sculpture?” Vernon described the sculpture as a “major work with high financial (several million €) & historical value,” and called on Carine Rolland, deputy mayor in charge of culture in Paris, to reinstall the work in public.

The office of Rolland, which oversees museums in the city, claimed that officials were considering three possible locations for the piece to be reinstalled “in the historic heart of Paris,” according to the French outlet Le Monde.

THE HEADLINES

IN MEMORIAM. Richard Serra, the sculptor whose monumental steel works defined the Minimalist art movement, has died at 85, reports ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger. “Serra crafted gigantic artworks that enlisted spirals, cubes, and cones of steel. These works loom over viewers, threatening to squash them,” writes Greenberger. They have also been hailed by critics as pushing sculpture into new conceptual realms, and Serra has shown in prestigious institutions across the globe, from Dia:Beacon in New York, to Qatar. But his pieces were not always admired. A 120-foot-long bar of Cor-Ten steel in New York’s Financial District, titled Tilted Arc (1981), was ultimately removed, “because people hated it so much.”

BRITISH MUSEUM SCANDAL. The British Museum is suing its former curator Peter Higgs, alleging he stole more than 1,800 items from its collection, reports Karen K. Ho, senior writer for ARTnews. Higgs was fired in July 2023, after the museum discovered approximately 2,000 missing, stolen, and damaged items from its collection, including ancient gems and gold jewelry. Exacerbating the controversy, many of these items had been spotted on eBay by an eagle-eyed collector, whose warnings to the institution were reportedly dismissed. The scandal has tarnished the museum’s reputation and led to the resignation of its leaders, including director Hartwig Fischer. Higgs has denied the allegations against him.

THE DIGEST

The mythic floating door that saved Rose, played by Kate Winslet, but not Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the film Titanic, just sold for more than $700,000 at a Treasures from Planet Hollywood auction. The door is one of film’s most controversial props, spurring decades of debate about whether both lovers could have squeezed onto it together, sparing their lives. [Entertainment Weekly]

Banksy’s recently painted mural in London has been covered with plastic affixed to a grid, blocking the artwork from view. Just days after it was unveiled, white paint was found splashed across large swaths of the work. [BBC]

A drawing from the American Revolution, bought in a batch of sketches from an antiques dealer in the 1970s, is in fact one of maybe a dozen existing eyewitness depictions of Continental troops. The drawing also includes women and children, who were rarely featured in artwork about the war, and will join the collection of the Museum of the American Revolution. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

Cambridge city council has ordered the removal of a statue of the late Prince Philip, that is so widely reviled, it has been called “possibly the poorest quality work” ever submitted, and no artist has admitted to making it. The abstract rendition of the late queen’s husband depicts him in academic robes with a face “resembling a twisted owl mask,” writes Emily Dugan. [The Guardian]

France’s judicial Conseil d’Etat (Council of State) has blocked a controversial bill on restituting art to Africa and other former French colonies. The bill was meant to be introduced in parliament early next month, but the high court for administrative cases said the bill’s stated motives for restitution— “international relations and cultural cooperation”—did not justify removing artworks from the country’s national collection. The bill reportedly refrains from mentioning that restitution should be granted to right past wrongs during France’s colonial era, a still heavily debated period. [Le Monde]

A group of Toronto artists is campaigning for arts-funder Scotiabank to divest from Israeli defense and homeland security manufacturer Elbit Systems. Yesterday, activists launched a “No Arms in the Arts” program targeting cultural events sponsored by Scotiabank, including Hot Docs Film Festival, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Toronto Biennial of Art. [Hyperallergic]

The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung analyzes why Russia is lending its Venice pavilion to Bolivia free of charge in a report by Geertjan de Vugt, who writes that Russia is aiming to gain access to Bolivia’s lithium reserves. [Süddeutsche Zeitung]

Visitor figures for global museums in 2023 are in, according to The Art Newspaper’s report. Things are now “mostly” back to normal, and many leading museums have returned to pre-pandemic attendance, but not all, notably those in the UK. [The Art Newspaper]

THE KICKER

WATER HOMES. “What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?” That is the question Dutch architect Koen Olthuis asks in a New Yorker story about his vision of cities that float on water. The threat of water overtaking The Netherlands is “so endemic to the Dutch national psyche,” that is has inspired myths, along with designs by Olthuis and his firm Waterstudio, which specializes in homes that float, writes Kyle Chayka. As the threat of climate change and flooding has risen, the studio says demand has grown internationally, from floating pod hotels in Thailand, a “floating forest” in the Persian Gulf to help temper overheating, and even a “floating city” in the Maldives. Olthuis says he hopes to install thousands of floating, affordable-housing units around the world. “It’s a lifetime of trying to connect the dots toward that future,” he said.

Serra’s sculptures defined a generation of art-making. Working on an unusually large scale, Serra crafted gigantic artworks that enlisted spirals, cubes, and cones of steel. These works loom over viewers, threatening to squash them.

But despite their menacing quality, Serra’s sculptures have enraptured viewers across the globe. They have been seen across the world, in venues ranging from Dia:Beacon in Upstate New York to the deserts of Qatar.

His works, however, have not been without controversy. Tilted Arc (1981), a 120-foot-long bar of Cor-Ten steel that was once set in a plaza in New York’s Financial District, is today remembered as one of the most reviled works of public art in the city’s history. It was ultimately taken away because people hated it so much.

Yet for the most part, critics have spoken hyperbolically of Serra’s work, viewing it as a game-changing oeuvre that succeeded in pushing sculpture into new conceptual realms. He contended with the ways in which an artwork not only exists in space but reorients it, shaping how viewers approach the area around them. Accordingly, his sculptures variously restrict, warp, and block the spaces viewers inhabit, forcing them to move through galleries in ways they may not normally.

“I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense,” Serra once said. “I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of ‘anti-environment’ which takes its own place or makes its own situation, or divides or declares its own area.”

Serra’s work is cold, unforgiving, and austere. Nearly all of it contains no psychological content, no figural imagery. It seems totally opposed to its viewer, who must accept the power differential between a human and a steel block weighing tons, then either surrender to it or fight back by ignoring these pieces altogether—which is hard to do, given their size.

It is the kind of art that has become a shorthand for the masculine bravado of many Minimalists. (Asked if he thought his work was feminine, Serra once said, “It’s not feminine.”) For that reason, it was sometimes targeted by feminist critics during the 1970s. Cindy Nemser once claimed that she had tried to interview Serra, and that he declined her request, telling her to “fuck off.” She published word of that in a 1972 essay called “Egomania and the Male Artist.” The artist David Hammons once spoofed the macho quality of Serra’s art with the performance Pissed Off (1981), for which he urinated on one of Serra’s public steel sculptures in New York.

These critiques did little to tarnish Serra’s reputation. He has proven massively influential to generations of artists. He even appeared in Matthew Barney’s 2002 film Cremaster 3, in which Serra plays The Architect, a God-like figure who can be seen splashing Vaseline against a wall in the Guggenheim Museum.

Richard Serra was born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco. Some Minimalists have discussed their artistic styles as being rooted in experiences formative to their development. In Serra’s case, many have divined a possible connection between his sculptures formed from industrial materials and the ships that he could see from the windows of his family’s home. When Serra was 5, he visited the shipyard where his father worked; that, too, has become crucial to Serra lore.

He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara as an undergraduate, finishing with a degree in English literature, and then attended Yale University’s graduate art program, having already taken art history courses there. At Yale, he played a trick on Robert Rauschenberg in which he gave the artist a box that secretly contained a chicken, which proceeded to make noise and defecate once let loose. Serra was ejected from the program for two weeks. “They told me I wasn’t ‘polite to guests,‘“ Serra recalled. “How can they kick you out of art school?”

Serra had set out to become a painter, then became disillusioned with the medium, which at the time was still associated with Abstract Expressionism and transcendence. Serra, wanting nothing to do with any of that, ended up moving in a less traditional route upon graduation from Yale in 1964, working with composer Philip Glass and staging a show composed solely of animals, only some of which were still alive.

His art of the late ’60s has been aligned with a movement known as Process art, which shifted the focus away from the completed art object, toward the means by which it was created. Verb List (1967–68) is a crucial artwork of that movement: it features, in carefully scrawled cursive, 54 verbs, ending with “to continue.” There were also pieces such as Splashing (1968), for which Serra threw molten lead against a wall of New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1969, Jasper Johns invited Serra to do a “splashing” work in his New York studio, as sure a sign as any that Serra’s star had fully ascended.

Serra’s art in mediums other than sculpture remains lesser-known but has been hugely important as well. His 1968 film Hand Catching Lead, a nearly-three-minute shot of his hand performing the titular action, has been acclaimed, as has his 1973 video Television Delivers People, made with Carlota Fay Schoolman, which was broadcast on TV. The latter work features a seven-minute scrolling text that attempts to invert the capitalist power dynamic that guides TV. “You are the product of t.v.,” it bitterly claims.

He also produced a range of prints and drawings over the years, and even shot documentation of early performances by Joan Jonas, with whom Serra fell in love, causing his marriage to the artist Nancy Graves to unravel. (Serra was married to Graves from 1965 to 1970; he would go on to wed Clara Weyergraf in 1981, and would remain married to her until his death.) Serra’s documentation of Jonas’s early works appears in her current Museum of Modern Art retrospective.

But for many, Serra’s big artistic breakthrough was his “Prop” sculptures of the late ’60s, for which he delicately placed lead sheets against steel poles. So tenuous were these balancing acts that they threatened to come apart entirely at the slightest disturbance.

These works differed greatly from Abstract Expressionist painting, which its makers believed to be imbued with all sorts of lofty ideas about the state of humanity. By contrast, Serra’s art seemed to be all about surfaces—they were conceptually driven, their content existing in the form of ideas that were appended to these objects. “Where else would content come from if not from the experience of perceiving the work,” Serra once said.

During the ’70s, Serra started to inset his works within landscapes and urban spaces. In 1971, he created his first rolled steel work, and from there would continue to rely on the material for works such as Circuit, staged at the 1977 edition of the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany. When it was installed in the German city of Bochum two years later, locals were not happy.

Their ire would prove no match for what Serra would experience when Tilted Arc was installed in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. The work was commissioned by a government body, and its perceived ugliness led 1,300 government workers to sign a petition calling for its removal. Serra said such a massive thing could not be taken away—it was meant to be permanent.

But the public was not persuaded, and the case even made it to court. A judge ruled that the piece would have to go—it made it impossible to fully surveil the government buildings it partially concealed. Serra then sued the United States General Services Office, claiming that his right to free speech had been violated. His claim was denied, and the sculpture was finally hauled away in 1989. The Wall Street Journal’s story about the removal bore the headline “Good Riddance.” Today, the sculpture resides in storage.

Although the Tilted Arc debacle has continued to follow any discussion of Serra’s art, it did not keep him from sculpting increasingly large steel works. Installing these works has not always been a safe endeavor. In 1971, a Serra sculpture weighing more than 5,000 pounds fell on an installer at the Walker Art Center, killing him. And in 1988, two workers were pinned for several minutes beneath a 32-ton Serra sculpture that they had been deinstalling.

Despite the evident danger of installing Serra works, many have not shown any fear of getting up-close to them. A number for epic steel works from the past couple decades have seduced viewers with their wavy, curved surfaces. In some cases, viewers can even walk into corridors created by these steel forms, which do not always offer pleasant experiences for claustrophobics.

Among Serra’s late-career triumphs is Equal (2015), an installation composed for 40-ton box-like forms that are balanced in twos, one atop the other. The work is currently afforded a gallery of its own at the Museum of Modern Art, which owns it.

Serra’s various accolades include the Venice Biennale’s lifetime achievement award, and he has received such major shows as a MoMA survey held in 2007.

Almost all of the sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, and more that Serra has done are crafted in shades of black. When critic Deborah Solomon asked Serra if he thought of trying another color, he mentioned he had a pink painting that he relegated to his closet. He toyed with green and purple, too. Then, he told Solomon, “For a week, I considered chartreuse seriously.”

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

Felsen, according to Takahatake, wanted to be a fly on the wall, preferring to be unseen and unheard to avoid disrupting their artistic processes. “He said the two words he felt he needed to live by were silent and invisible. One of the greatest compliments he felt someone could pay him was, when they would say: I didn’t even realize that you were there,” Takahatake said.

In the mid-’60s, Felsen brought in artists primarily on his own instinct, mailing postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. That process would lead him to that building out a personal network with some of the mid-20th century’s biggest creative forces. Critics and historians who have analyzed Gemini’s peak years have emphasized how Felsen and Grinstein, who died in 2014, gave artists unusual amount of freedom to work, seemingly without any financial or material restrictions. A 2010 Artforum review of a Robert Rauschenberg show detailed how critical the shop was to the artist and his peers, providing an atmosphere that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”

There were few other artists who produced as much under Felsen’s tutelage as Rauschenberg. In a 2013 interview, Felsen recalled first meeting the artist, who was looking to make a full-body print using a medical X-Ray, at an airport in 1967. “He wanted one plate—6 feet—of his whole body. We found out there is no such thing in the United States—except that Eastman Kodak in Rochester had a six-foot machine,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview. For another project Felsen took Rauschenberg to a Los Angeles Times printing facility to scour through metal type barrels for material; it was one of some 50 times Rauschenberg came to the shop over the next three decades. Felsen balanced being a close friend, while giving Rauschenberg the space to ideate, often watching in awe at the speed of Rauschenberg’s creative spurts. “He never looked back at his work,” Felsen said.

Because Felsen sought to capture the print shop’s private moments, he never intended to publish his archive of images, which lined the studio’s walls. Until 2003, they went uncatalogued. And that approach allowed him to get a level of candid access that most journalists would dream of. “I can’t work in front of people,” Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize–winning artist who works primarily in photography and film, told the Getty for an essay accompanying the show. “It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that.”

There’s a sense of a palpable joy in Felsen’s photographs, in which now famous artists resemble students at play, their expressions mostly candid and unserious. In one, David Hockney tacks drawings of his inner circle to Gemini’s walls, while in another, Richard Serra keeps his heads down, pouring black paint on the floor. “I think something that is quite notable about Gemini is the fact that they had to foster these long-term relationships with artists—it was by invitation,” Takahatake said.

“A lot of my friend were artists or just collectors,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview, describing how he’d put aside his career as an accountant to work with artists. Initially, he focused on LA artists, but he soon found himself nearly at the center of the global art world. In 1966, through chance, Man Ray, ever an enigma of an artist, came to Gemini when he had a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Surrealist had recently relocated from Paris to LA, focusing on commissioned photographs for fashion magazines; the museum arranged for him to stay at Grinstein’s house, bringing him into Gemini’s circle.

Decades later, with a close-knit yet expansive network, Felsen continued to run the shop until 2018, at the age of 93, always with the guiding principle, as Takahatake put it, of “how to be a good friend.”

The performance, which includes renditions of lead single “Wild Flower,” “Change Pt. 2,” and “Still Life,” coincides with the release of his solo album, Indigo, on December 2 and showcases numerous works at the museum.

“I thought [“Still Life”]could resonate with the artwork perfectly because you know it’s a whole kind of transformation,” the singer, rapper, and songwriter said in an interview with the museum published Friday. RM added that Dia Beacon had transformed the former box factory into a “magical,” “charming,” and “fascinating” place.

“The way the light touches the surface of the artworks, it’s just visually amazing.”

RM, whose real name is Kim Namjoon, visited Dia Beacon last December and posted images of the museum’s exhibits to his now 40 million Instagram followers.

The works showcased in RM’s performance include Robert Irwin’s landscape architecture on the property, John Chamberlain’s crushed metal sculptures, Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, and Dan Flavin’s 1973 light sculpture untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection).

In the interview with Dia Beacon, RM further explained why he chose each work, starting with his admiration for Richard Serra’s sculptures in museums like Glenstone and LACMA.

“I absolutely wanted to do a live performance along his artworks in Dia Beacon because his artworks are kind of like a symbol of this place,” RM said.

For his choice of John Chamberlain, RM said he was fascinated by “the idea of how tough steel or cars could be transformed into an actual sculpture. I found it very refreshing.” RM additionally called Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent lights captivating and said “his works have the power to transform, his lamps have a greater presence in this LED world that we live in today.”

RM has been recognized as an arts advocate for his much publicized visits to dozens of museums and galleries, amid a hectic schedule of concert performances and publicity events. RM’s enthusiastic posts about visits to places like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Getty Museum, has increased their online engagement on social media and sent BTS fans to see those institutions, eager to see the same works he posted on Instagram.

RM has also been personally studying, collecting, and loaning art, like a $1.2 million sculpture by American multidisciplinary artist Roni Horn titled Untitled (But the boomerang that returns is not the same one I threw), 2013–17, works by Korean artists Yun Hyong-keun and Lee Bae, as well as a sculpture by the American Minimalist Joel Shapiro. Earlier this year, RM lent a sculpture by artist Kwon Jin Kyu to the Seoul Museum of Art.

RM’s influence on the art world even made an out-of-print book on Korean artists a bestseller, after he was photographed reading it in the summer of 2021. He was also recently recognized by a South Korean agency for his numerous financial contributions to arts institutions helping preserve the country’s artifacts overseas.

In a previous interview with ARTnews, RM explained that he chooses the museums and galleries he visits outside South Korea based on exhibitions featuring favorite artists, his own curiosity, and the spaces themselves. In South Korea, RM goes to places that feature modern and contemporary Korean artists.

“Visual art has helped me develop unique textures of sound, and added depth to my music. The habit of thinking in different senses and dimensions … also inspired me a lot,” he said.

See the film below:

In a prior post, the Qatar Museums said the vandalism took place on December 28 and that an unspecified number of people had been apprehended in connection with them. Since the vandalism, the institution has undertaken a cleaning effort for the work to rid it of scratches and graffiti.

“Over the last 2 months, security have patrolled the area and are reporting incidents to the police,” the Qatar Museums wrote on Wednesday. “Vandalism of all kinds is a crime punishable by law, and Qatar Museums emphasises our collective social responsibility to preserve public art.”

East West/West East was commissioned by the Qatari royal family, and it features a set of monolith-like steel plates arranged across a half-mile stretch. Those plates are of varying heights, with the tallest one rising 55 feet into the air.

Serra’s sculpture—among the largest ones that the Minimalist sculptor has ever produced—has been the subject of vandalism on at least one other occasion. In 2020, the Qatar Museums said that East West/West East was “severely and deliberately damaged” by vandals. A campaign to support the protection of public works in Qatar was launched months later that involved the addition of surveillance systems to monitor the area around the Serra commission.

There are indoor galleries nearby, but Storm King isn’t a museum in any static sense. Throughout its 60-year history, the sculpture park has more than doubled in size, with its borders currently occupying some 500 acres. Its curatorial ambitions have grown, too, and its landscape now accommodates pieces both permanent and ephemeral. During the current pandemic, with indoor museums seeming less appealing, the art center has become a bona fide destination—tickets are now selling out weeks in advance, making Storm King one of the hottest New York art spaces right now.

But before it became the sensation it is currently, Storm King started out relatively small. “The project began as a family-led institution,” John Stern, the president of Storm King since 2008, told ARTnews. “My grandfather started this from his love of the Hudson Highlands.”

When they purchased the Vermont Hatch estate in Mountainville in 1959 that would later become Storm King, metal manufacturers Ralph “Ted” Ogden and H. Peter Stern envisioned a more modest operation. Ogden planned an indoor museum dedicated to the paintings of the Hudson River School, to be housed in the French-inspired stone chateau on the grounds. Nothing about the area was picture-perfect, however: the estate was in disrepair; construction of the New York State Thruway had displaced millions square yards of gravel from the farmlands, depriving the landscape of natural protection from the elements; and nearby cedars and dogwoods were choked with vines and poison ivy.

Ogden overhauled the aesthetics together with his son-in-law Stern, who also managed the administrative side of the operation, and landscape architect William A. Rutherford, Sr. Together, they filled depressions, softened the hillside, built walkways, and restored the gardens. Later, it was decided the diseased Red Pines were to be replaced with White Pines on a yearly basis. (The grounds are a work in eternal progress.)

Storm King Art Center opened in 1960 with exhibitions centered on American and European pastoral paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Still, Ogden was unsatisfied. “He was searching for an art medium that would work alongside the open space,” said Stern.

In 1967, Ogden traveled to the Adirondacks to visit the home and studio of David Smith, an Abstract Expressionist sculptor who had died suddenly two years prior. It was a formative visit, as Ogden saw in the outdoor arrangement of Smith’s sculptures a new vision for his beloved project. He acquired 13 brightly colored steel, iron, and bronze pieces that now rank among Storm King’s most prized possessions. David Collens, Storm King’s director and chief curator since the mid-1970s, developed the idea that each piece required its own space in the landscape. 

Alexander Calder, Five Swords, 1976.

Today, a facilities crew with fewer than a dozen members maintains the giant complex. They trim trees, replant native flora, and refurbish the sculptures. It often takes a full day to mow Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, a 240,000-square-foot rolling swell of grass. At any given time, the grounds contain around 115 sculptures, including permanent installations by Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, Isamu Noguchi, and Nam June Paik. Storm King senior curator Nora Lawrence explained that commissioned artists are encouraged to create works in tandem with the environment, with the understanding that the demands of the land may inform the final outcome. (Mercurial Upstate New York weather exerts its own will, too.)

Unlike conventional museums, Storm King will grapple with more existential threats in the coming years, as climate change demands new strategies of preservation. In the meantime, the institution faces expected challenges, such as how to be a better community partner or keep programming incisive. “We all want to continue to present people with what they’ve always loved about Storm King, but help evolve the idea of what outdoor sculpture can be,” Lawrence said.

Below are five seminal exhibitions and site-specific commission that have come to define Storm King.

Richard Serra, Schunnemunk Fork (1990–91)

At the time Serra produced this site-specific commission, a group of trees marked the southern edge of Storm King’s property—an area previously unexplored by visiting artists. The venerated Minimalists set out to be among the first to chart the terrain. He inserted in a field four weathered steel plates, each about eight feet high and nearly three inches thick. They are arranged lengthwise in a careful interval, corresponding to the field’s eight-foot descent, but they appear to jut out from the environment as some hills rise and fall. Since the sculpture’s creation, the area around it has undergone subtle changes, as the landscape accommodated new walkways and sculptures.

Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall (1997–98)

Goldsworthy’s first museum commission in the United States was conceived as a 750-foot-long dry stone wall snaking through the center’s grounds—a reference to centuries-old structures native to British farmlands. A team of British wallers were tasked with harvesting new stones and layering the artwork atop the remnants of a dilapidated farm wall, extending the original structure until it reached its intended endpoint at the base of an oak tree. Just as the sculpture was about to be completed, Goldsworthy changed course, and the work’s trajectory was extended nearly half a mile past the tree, plunging downhill into a nearby pond and emerging on the opposite bank. The wall, partly erected stone by stone, eventually winded uphill to the New York State Thruway, the western edge of Storm King’s property. It now spans a total length of 2,278 feet. The work “really illustrated a way in which artists could ask how the art, nature, and the visitor experience could come together,” said Lawrence. 

“Lynda Benglis: Water Sources” (2015)

Overlooking Storm King’s south sprawl is North South East West (1988–2015), a fountain sculpture by Lynda Benglis composed of four bronze and steel figures. Though they’re made of metal, wire, and ceramic, the figures resemble something organic, like lapping waves, slow-cooling lava, or primordial crustaceans. These are related to ones that appeared in “Water Sources,” the first-ever exhibition of Benglis’s water sculptures, with works dating back to the ’70s. Among the most recent sculptures on display was Hills and Clouds, a phosphorescent piece composed of layers of stainless steel  and polyurethane foam. The impression is of layers of clouds, or a gem-crusted cave shifting in the light. “I wanted to imply something that appears to rise instead of being connected entirely to the earth,” Benglis said at the time.

“David Smith: The White Sculptures” (2017)

The show, which Lawrence co-organized with David R. Collens, drew on an integral piece of Storm King history. Its focus was Abstract Expressionist sculptures by Smith, whose studio Ogden had visited in 1967. There, he found around 100 large and small-scale sculptures, nearly all of which were coated in bright colors. Just eight sculptures were left white. For this show, the sculpture park borrowed six of the eight white sculptures, placing them alongside what are believed to be Smith’s earliest works. It was an exhibition best served by its location; the varied hues of the natural backdrop appeared to bring out the cool white tones on display in Smith’s forms, whose cutouts resembled windows or frames.

“Indicators: Artists on Climate Change” (2018)

Concerns about nature in flux have always been felt at Storm King, and the art spaces’s greatest expression of that was the 2018 show “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change.” The 17 artists included pondered a diverse array of issues. Gabriela Salazar’s Matters in Shelter (and Place, Puerto Rico), 2018, featured wooden poles supporting a blue mesh tarp, under which lay coffee beans on a cinder block floor—an homage to temporary structures erected for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. Elsewhere, Meg Webster offered a solar-powered garden that grew native flora that was replanted on the grounds following the show’s run. And in his film Midstream at Twilight (2016), Steve Rowell followed a drone as it traced the transit path of petroleum coke from the headquarters of Koch Industries to its endpoint at a power plant in China.  

Update, 11/16/20, 10:09 a.m.: The article has been updated to reflect H. Peter Stern’s role in the landscaping of the initial grounds of the Storm King Art Center.

Removals such as these have historical precedents. Below is a guide to some of the most notable artworks that have been removed—either by force or by choice—over the past 50 or so years.

Takis pulls work from Museum of Modern Art (1969)
“The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” Pontus Hultén’s 1968 group show at MoMA, has been considered a landmark exhibition for its interest in technology. But the show is also major for what happened around it—the removal of an artwork by the Greek artist Takis. Toward the end of the show’s run, Takis picked up a sculpture of his that was on view in the exhibition, claiming that the museum had not consulted him before installing it, and moved it into MoMA’s courtyard. He described the removal as a symbolic action intended to open up conversation between artists and upper-ranking museum staff. After discussion with MoMA’s director, the work was officially taken out of the exhibition for good.

Robert Morris closes show at the Whitney Museum (1970)
Robert Morris removed not just one artwork but an entire show as debate surrounding the Vietnam War raged in America. Many in the New York art scene tried to figure out what role artists could play in protest, and Morris became the leader of an antiwar movement that swept the city’s art world—and even resulted in a widespread strike that saw museums and galleries close. As part of his efforts, Morris shuttered his solo exhibition at the Whitney in an gesture, he said at the time, meant “to underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from an making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war and racism in this country.”

Daniel Buren sculpture taken down at the Guggenheim (1971)
Many artists have dramatically transformed the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but none has courted so much scandal as Daniel Buren. His artistic intervention in the space—a striped drape titled Around the Corner that hung from the ceiling and extended almost all the way down—didn’t seem controversial. But some artists who were exhibiting in its midst (in a now-defunct recurring survey known as the Guggenheim International) felt differently. In an effort led by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, five artists claimed that Buren’s art obstructed views of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sloping architecture—and their own work. They called for it to be deinstalled, and after they got what they wanted, feted art historian Douglas Crimp (then a curator at the museum) resigned because of the fracas.

Ulay moves Hitler’s favorite painting  (1976)
Sometimes removal can be both a form of protest and an artwork in itself. For a “protest action” titled Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art, performance artist Ulay seized his attention on the 1837 Carl Spitzweg painting The Poor Poet: a quaint image of a writer counting out the meters of his verse in a cramped attic that was also Adolf Hitler’s favorite artwork (he even owned a copy of it). Ulay chose not to let Germany forget that fact by marching into the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, taking the work of the wall, and bringing it to the home of a Turkish immigrant elsewhere in the city. Ulay returned the painting 30 hours later, and the temporary theft was documented by his partner Marina Abramović.

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc deinstalled (1989)
From its initial installation in 1981, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc—a 120-foot-long arc crafted with Corten steel in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Plaza—was meant to lead to an intriguing reorientation of a viewer’s understanding of a picturesque location. Not everyone saw it that way, however—and after howls from the public, a jury voted in favor of taking down the enormous mass of 73 tons of steel that were unceremoniously hauled away to a government-owned parking lot in Brooklyn.

Adrian Piper pulls out of Conceptualism survey in L.A. (1995)
In 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles staged “1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” a major survey focused loosely on the evolution of Conceptualism. But the proceedings were marred by controversy when one of the sponsors was revealed: Philip Morris, the cigarette company that owns Marlboro. The artists in the show claimed not to have been notified in advance, and Adrian Piper asked MOCA to pull her work from the show and replace it with Ashes to Ashes (1995), a piece focused on her parents’ struggles with—and, ultimately, deaths from—cancer that may have been caused by smoking. When the museum declined, she withdrew from the show entirely.

Tania Bruguera installation shuttered at the Havana Biennial (2000)
Tania Bruguera is no stranger to controversy, having regularly staged boundary-pushing performances that have raised the ire of officials in her home country of Cuba. Originally staged in a fortress used to house political prisoners in the 1950s, her installation Untitled (Havana, 2000) was a darkened space in which viewers could see barely visible nude performers who appeared to be slapping their bodies and video footage of Fidel Castro as they walked across a mat of sugarcane. Brugerua’s consideration of the state of the body under oppressive regimes was closed by authorities hours after opening. Since then, it has been acquired by MoMA, which restaged it in 2018.

Adrian Piper yanks video from black performance art exhibition (2013)
Eighteen years after her MOCA removal, Piper pulled work from “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” an exhibition spread across NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Piper’s work appeared in the NYU part, where she was presenting documentation of her past performances as the Mythic Being—a male alter ego she assumed to test gender and racial norms. Piper said she felt limited by the show’s purview and suggested that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver organize “multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’”

Yams Collective drops out of the Whitney Biennial (2014)
Amid outrage over a work by the white male artist Joe Scanlan, who got black female performers to play a fictional character known as Donelle Woolford, the Yams Collective (also known by the name HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?) pulled their work from the Whitney Biennial in 2014. “We felt that the representation of an established academic white man posing as a privileged African-American woman is problematic, even if he tries to hide it in an avatar’s mystique,” one of the collective’s members told Hyperallergic at the time.

Shanghai officials strike Ai Weiwei from survey (2014)
Ai Weiwei has frequently accused governments and museum figures of censorship in ways that have affected his standing in his home country of China. In 2014, days before the government-operated Power Station of Art in Shanghai was to stage an exhibition devoted to the winners of collector Uli Sigg’s Chinese Contemporary Art Award, officials in the city yanked Ai’s work—including his famed Sunflower Seeds installation—and dropped his name from the artist list. At the time, Sigg said, “We don’t understand but we must accept that his works will not be in there.”

Animals pulled from Chinese art show in New York (2017)
The Guggenheim Museum faced a widespread outcry when several historically important artworks featuring live animals went on view in a survey of Chinese art. The controversial pieces included Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World, featuring a see-through case in which insects and amphibians preyed upon one another; photo documentation of Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference, in which pigs were inked with Chinese characters; and a Sun Yuan and Peng Yu video that involved dogs on treadmills. Animal-rights groups widely decried the works, and after an online petition garnered tens of thousands of signatures, the museum pulled them—leading some to wonder whether the protesters properly understood the cultural context for the art on view.

Olu Oguibe obelisk taken down in Germany (2018)
A giant obelisk dedicated to immigrants by Nigerian-born Olu Oguibe was one of the most celebrated offerings at the 2017 edition of Documenta—it even won the artist the exhibition’s top prize. But after the city of Kassel formalized plans to install the work, the work, titled Monument to Strangers and Refugees, was targeted by right-wing politicians who raised doubts about its pro-refugee message and the price of its installation. The monument was removed—but then, just two weeks later, reinstated.

10 artists pull out of the Aichi Triennale in Japan (2019)
Almost from its beginning, the Aichi Triennale began generating controversy when officials made the decision to remove a show-within-a-show titled “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” That exhibition featured a sculpture by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung that referred to the history of ianfu—Asian women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. And when it was taken off view, 10 artists—including Pedro Reyes, Tania Bruguera, Minouk Lim, and Claudia Martínez Garay—pulled their own works from the triennial, claiming that the removal of the ianfu piece was a violation of its makers’ freedom of expression. Ultimately, officials relented—and the ianfu work was reinstated along with all the other works that been taken away.

Installation view of “Reverse Curve” at Gagosian’s 21st Street location.

ANNIE ARMSTRONG/ARTNEWS

Tuesday night marked the opening of a three-part Richard Serra exhibition at Gagosian gallery in New York, with drawings on the Upper East Side and two much-anticipated large-scale steel pieces at two locations in Chelsea. On 21st Street, there’s Reverse Curve (2015–19), a Cor-Ten steel mammoth that towers over visitors, and on 24th Street, there’s Forged Rounds (2019), which is arranged like a forest of 50-ton rounded blocks. The opening brought out a bevy of art world dignitaries, and ARTnews asked some of them a simple question: Can you describe Richard Serra in three words? (Many respondents required a few more, but they all tried.)

Another question arose while spying the many who could be seen photographing Serra’s new work: Would Tilted Arc—the artist’s giant sculptural intervention on Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza that was removed following rampant public controversy in 1981—have stayed on view in the age of Instagram?

Answers to both queries follow below.

How would you describe Richard Serra in three words?

Joan Jonas, artist
Profound weight with lightness.

Hugh Freund, lawyer specializing in art and museums
Heavyweight art superstar.

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine
Between art and a dock.

Mary Heilmann, artist
Reminds me of surfing.

Susan Kleinberg, artist
Tough and beautiful.

Bill Powers, founder of Half Gallery 
Fifty-ton limit.

Larry Gagosian, founder of Gagosian gallery
It’s not possible.

Would Tilted Arc have remained standing if it were installed in the age of Instagram?

Joan Jonas
No. I don’t know why, but no.

Jerry Saltz
Tilted Arc was taken down because it succeeded in making its critique of corporate architecture. Would I leave it up today? Sure.

Mary Heilmann
Yes. I suppose people would have liked to take their picture with it.

Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic for the New York Times
Probably not. [But] I think it’s an interesting turning point: After that, Richard’s work becomes so much more involved. That was when he started having big shows [with] lines out the door. He changed something, and what he did was make his work really participatory—especially the “Arcs.”