Richard Serra Drawing

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is the catalogue for the first full museum survey of Serra's drawings. The Menil Collection and Yale University Press co-published it in 2011; Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels edited it.

The 230-page hardcover reproduces drawings spanning Serra's career alongside essays situating the work against his sculpture. Lizzie Borden, Magdalena Dabrowski, Richard Shiff, and the artist himself contributed as well. The exhibition it accompanied traveled between three institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (April-August 2011), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 2011-January 2012), and the Menil Collection in Houston (March-June 2012), the institution that organized the show.

Serra is best known for monumental steel sculpture. But he has drawn continuously since the 1970s in a distinct body of work: large sheets of paper worked over in dense black paintstick. This retrospective treated the drawings as inseparable from the sculpture, not preparatory to it, and it was the first major museum survey devoted solely to that side of his work.