The Brooklyn Rail

Richard’s wondrous, overwhelming piece, Iron Mountain Run, fills a field at my farm. On every trip I take to Connecticut, I love that piece all over again. I love the majestic comment it makes on the soil beneath it, the respect it demands for the built and the unbuilt in our world. Large drunken slabs that come out of the landscape and transform it in the most amazing way possible, now so intrinsically tied to the land that I think of them as one. Everyone who was involved with Richard on this project still talks about what an exciting experience it was to see a master at work, and how remarkably gracious he was at every step.

I was so fortunate to have known Richard for many decades, well before that commission in 2002. In fact, the first major piece we acquired was a work entitled Plate Prop Roll (1969) in 1978 from Blum Helman and currently gifted to the Cleveland Museum. I always admired Richard’s steadfast convictions and his power to awe. He was a larger-than-life figure creating larger-than-life work, but also a dear friend who was always so kind to me.

I recall running into Peter Schjeldahl in the fall of 2019 at a spectacular show of Richard’s that spanned three Gagosian galleries. We stood in the shadow of a nearly twenty-foot-high, hundred-foot-long S-shaped weatherproof steel with a patina of textured rust, and talked about illness, legacy, life and death. He talked about the gravitas and weight of Richard’s in-your-face materiality and bombastic scale. Peter concluded that Serra was one of, if not the most, important sculptors of this epoch, and naturally I agreed. It was an indelible memory, talking with a giant, about a giant, in the shadow of a giant.