Richard Serra is a contemporary Minimalist artist known for his monumental steel sculptures. Often daunting in scale, Serra’s swooping architectural curves often provoke dizziness and disorientation as viewers walk through their winding passages. His exploration of the properties of unconventional materials—such as Splash (1968–1970), a series using molten lead, and Belts (1966–1967), sculptures of Vulcanized rubber—gradually increased the scale of practice as he moved the placement of his works outdoors. Like Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, Serra’s attention to materiality has been the hallmark of his practice. Born on November 2, 1938 in San Francisco, CA, the artist attended the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, graduating in 1961 with a BA in English literature. Serra studied with Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Nancy Graves at Yale University, where he earned his MFA in 1964. “It was the first time I looked at sculpture seriously,” Serra has said of visiting Constantin Brancusi’s studio in Paris after graduating. “I really responded to the strength and simplicity and abstraction of the work.” Serra currently lives and works between New York, NY and Nova Scotia, Canada.