Richard Serra, Doctor of Fine Arts
“To roll, to cut, to tie, to bend, to fold” — these are the verbs you wrote down to guide your explorations of the steel you had first come to know while working in the mills around San Francisco to pay for college. The results over succeeding decades have been monumental creations, without imagery or metaphor, that with raw physicality draw viewers in, disorient them, and awaken their sense of space. The size of these works, some more than one hundred feet long, means they occupy more than most sculptures the fourth dimension of time. They inhabit not only museums but great public spaces where they draw children as well as adults into direct sensory experiences that require no prior knowledge or expertise. People have been known to wander through them for hours. You have been described as “one of the last great modernists,” whose work has exploded our conception of what sculpture is, and the critic Robert Hughes has called you “not only the best sculptor alive but the only great one at work anywhere.” Not bad for someone who sets out each day, as he has for the past half century, with the simple but sublime goal of playing open-endedly with the properties of your favorite material.
I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree Doctor of Fine Arts, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 1, 2008