I was fortunate to have met Richard Serra on several occasions. The first time, Judy Chicago called Sidney Felsen and arranged for me and Suzanne Lacy to visit Gemini Studio late one night. Mark Stock was assisting Richard at the press. Suzanne and I honored the creative process, knowing well not to interrupt; but observing the artist at work was a singular and rewarding experience. Decades later I viewed the work from the night at his retrospective at SFMOMA with my son and grandson. The next time we met he was in Bellingham considering the site for his piece on the campus of Western Washington University. It was an honor to sit next to him at the dinner the university hosted celebrating him. And it was exhilarating to hear him talk about art history, the importance of artists like Picasso and Pollack. When he returned for the installation of Wright’s Triangle he allowed me to shadow him for several days while he worked with the installation crew. He took an interest in my old German camera, a Leica IIf which was unobtrusive, except for an accessory viewfinder (Vidom) which piqued his curiosity. The morning following the installation and site clean-up I found Richard in deep concentration, observing his newly completed work, looking at the site with pathways to be redesigned. As with any change, and especially something new and bold, it took a while before people learned to love it.
The last time I saw him was in Seattle in Belltown, near what would eventually become the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. We spoke that day about an exhibition curated by the late Gene Baro, of Black and White Drawings which included works by both of us. A few years later our works hung side by side at an exhibition at the former Seattle Art Museum Pavilion in a selection of art from Seattle’s Portable Art Collection.
As of this writing, I am preparing to move to a live workspace very close to where we last spoke, and like Wright’s Triangle that I experienced daily over many years, I look forward to many visits to Wake.
Fred A. Bernstein writing in the Washington Post offers a moving obituary
