His mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Odessa, was an avid reader and eager to see her sons succeed.
Mr. Serra drew constantly from an early age, in part, he admitted, to compete with his brighter, more athletic older brother, Tony, for the attention of his parents. . His third-grade teacher, impressed by his drawings, told his mother to take him to an art museum. She started introducing him to people as an artist.
Tony Serra would become a lawyer best known for his left-wing views, his vow of poverty, and his defense of Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton and members of the extremist group Symbionese Liberation Army. (The two brothers did not speak for 25 years, but Richard Serra eventually helped pay for college for Tony's five children.)
After spending a year at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined the Progressive Students for a Democratic Society, Mr. Serra transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara. The university was small and highly competitive, and he remembers being “nagged around.” Sparring back and forth. ” There he majored in English literature, taking classes with Margaret Mead, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood, and studying art with painters Howard Warshaw and Rico LeBlanc.
He was planning to continue his literary studies in graduate school when Mr. Warshaw told him he should consider applying to art school. Mr. Serra sent his painting group to Yale University and received a scholarship. His classmates there included Mr. Close, the painters Bryce Marden (who died in August) and Rackstraw Downs, and the sculptor Nancy Graves, who became his girlfriend. Among his teachers, he was particularly influenced by the painter Philip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman. He later described the large paintings he produced at Yale University as “imitations of Pollock de Koonings.”
A Yale travel fellowship and subsequent Fulbright grant enabled him to spend two years in Europe with Ms. Graves, who also received a Fulbright grant. The two married in 1964 in Paris, where she befriended composer Philip Glass. After Velazquez's revelation in Madrid, in Florence, Italy, Mr. Serra began creating works featuring stuffed and live animals in cages. His first solo exhibition entitled “Live Animal Habitats” was held in 1966 at the Galleria La Salita in Rome.
