Ten years ago, the Saint Louis Art Museum removed Richard Serra’s sculpture To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted, near the south entrance, to construct the East Building. Starting Tuesday, it’s back on display for viewing—and walking on, and driving over.
The sculpture, the artist’s first major public work, is planted in the asphalt of Fine Arts Drive, which passes by the front of the main building. Serra designed it to be walked and driven over. But SLAM wasn’t the first home of Serra’s work. From 1970 to 1072, the artwork, which is about 26 feet in diameter, was part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture” and embedded in 183rd Street in the Bronx. Serra described the location in an 1980 interview with Arts Magazine as “sinister, used by the local criminals to torch the cars they’d stolen.” And it wasn’t really a hit—but it was due to location. He elaborated, “There was no audience for the sculpture in the Bronx, and it was my misconception that the so-called art audience would seek the work out.”
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Ronald and Jan Greenberg, who own the The Greenberg Gallery, donated the piece to SLAM in 1984.
Serra, 80, is probably best known for his large, site-specific sculptures placed in urban areas. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has celebrated his work with two retrospectives. In 2014, SLAM’s exhibit “Sight Lines: Richard Serra’s Drawings for Twain” explored the model Serra made for his large-scale sculpture, Twain, in downtown St. Louis. You can find another Serra sculpture, Joe, at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Emily Rauh Pulitzer commissioned it, and it’s named in honor of her late husband, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who commissioned one of Serra’s first public works.
