The Brooklyn Rail

Richard saw my work in 2005. Of course, I had known his work for years—passing through his piece Stacks (1990) every day, as it was installed right in the middle of the sculpture hall in the Old Yale Art Gallery. At Richard’s memorial at MoMA, Sam Keller came up to me and said, “Richard’s work is kind of like yours, but it’s the opposite,” which was haunting because I remember distinctly what Richard generously said to me when I first met him. I found him to be incredibly generous in every way with his fellow artists, including younger generations. While writing a profile on me for the New Yorker, Andrea K. Scott asked Richard to be the main interviewee, and he took it very seriously. Richard asked for every catalogue, article, and written material from my archives to be sent to him, and he spent time carefully reading, reflecting on the nature of my work. Andrea later told me of the incredibly generous and articulate hours he spent with her and his dedication to the project—unusual for any artist to do for another, much less Richard, with such stature and under great demand on all fronts. He was unbridled in the grandeur of his praise with statements of how I was “changing the potential of sculpture”—phrases that remain unparalleled in their reception. Richard also told me that when he moved to Orient, he was faced with the gentle fragility of nature in a way he had never known before, and he was taken by how he found this in my work. What a great gift it was to meet Richard in that moment of his life. After studying his relentlessly radical body of work for decades and seeing how he observed and reinvented, generosity continued to emerge with a sea of tingly serious curiosity.

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For Richard (1938–2024):
A Weight with Needles on the pounds

A Weight with Needles on the pounds—
To push, and pierce, besides—
That if the Flesh resist the Heft—
The puncture—coolly tries—
That not a pore be overlooked
Of all this Compound Frame—
As manifold for Anguish—
As Species—be—for name—

Emily Dickinson