Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc: The 1985 Hearing, Lawsuit, and Removal

The controversy over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc began the moment the 120-foot steel wall was installed at Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981 and ended in March 1989, when the U.S. General Services Administration cut the sculpture into three pieces and hauled it away. In between came petitions from more than 5,300 federal workers, a three-day public hearing, a $30 million lawsuit, and a Second Circuit ruling that an artist who sells a work to the government has no constitutional right to keep it on display.

The Sculpture at Federal Plaza

The GSA commissioned Serra in 1979 through its Art-in-Architecture program for the plaza outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza. A selection panel of art professionals appointed by the National Endowment for the Arts ranked Serra as their preferred artist, and the GSA administrator made the final call.¹ Serra signed a contract in September 1979 for a fee of $175,000.²

Installed in 1981, the piece was a curving wall of Cor-Ten self-rusting steel, 12 feet high and 120 feet long, weighing more than 73 tons. It bisected the plaza between the federal building and the courthouse.³ Serra designed it as a site-specific work: its form, scale, and orientation were built for that plaza and that plaza only. Move it, he insisted, and you destroy it.

Why Federal Workers Wanted It Removed

Within two months of installation, 1,300 employees who worked in and around the plaza signed a petition asking for the sculpture’s removal.⁴ The complaints were practical: the rusting wall blocked the path across the plaza, cut off the view of a fountain, and turned an open gathering space into something to walk around. Critics called it a “hulk of rusty steel,” said it attracted graffiti and vermin, and compared it to the Berlin Wall.⁵

William Diamond, the GSA’s regional administrator in New York, became the driving force behind removal. He gathered an additional 4,000 signatures, bringing the total past 5,300, and told CNN that the GSA had “made a mistake” in commissioning the work.⁴ Federal judges in the adjacent courthouse joined the opposition. Judge Gregory W. Carman called the work “depressing and overbearing” and testified that transients had been observed urinating on it.³

The 1985 Hearing and the Vote to Relocate

In March 1985 the GSA convened a three-day public hearing in New York. The five-member panel was chaired by Diamond himself, along with Gerald Turetsky, Paul Chistolini, Michael Findlay of Christie’s, and attorney Thomas Lewyn.³ One hundred and eighty people testified. By the count, 122 spoke for keeping the sculpture and 58 for removing it.⁶

Supporters included artists Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella, William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art, and filmmaker Emile de Antonio. Joan Mondale urged the panel to let history judge the piece, saying “art that discomforts us the most eventually becomes our proudest possession.”³ They argued the work was site-specific and that relocation would destroy it. Opponents kept to the practical grievances. Representative Ted Weiss said the sculpture had been imposed without any community consultation. Some raised security concerns, arguing the wall could shield a bomb blast or conceal surveillance threats.⁷

Despite the lopsided testimony in the sculpture’s favor, the panel voted 4 to 1 to relocate.⁶ Serra called the process biased, pointing out that Diamond had publicly declared the commission a mistake before chairing the panel that decided its fate.⁴

The recommendation went to Acting GSA Administrator Dwight Ink in Washington. In May 1985 he ordered relocation, saying he relied primarily on the views of federal employees and community residents who found the work interfered with their use of the plaza. Ink explicitly stated that he “made no judgment whatsoever concerning the aesthetic value of the Tilted Arc.” He had reviewed the full record and met personally with Serra and his attorney beforehand.²

Serra’s Lawsuit and Why He Lost

Serra sued the GSA for $30 million, alleging breach of contract, copyright and trademark violations, and infringement of his First and Fifth Amendment rights.⁴ After his original attorney fell ill, Jay Topkis of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison took the case pro bono. Topkis was blunt with Serra and his wife Clara Weyergraf-Serra: “I’ll take this case, and I’ll take it pro bono. I’ll write the best briefs, and I’ll do whatever’s in my power, but you’re not going to win.”⁷

U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack dismissed the suit. He found no evidence the GSA’s decision was based on the sculpture’s message and ruled the agency had acted within its authority to maintain government property. The work’s size, the court said, made the plaza “physically impractical for use as a site for major events and public gatherings.” Pollack also dismissed the copyright and trademark claims and held he lacked jurisdiction over the contract claim.⁸

The Second Circuit affirmed in 1988. Judges Jon O. Newman, Amalya Kearse, and District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum rejected each of Serra’s constitutional theories:

On the First Amendment, the court held that Serra relinquished his speech interest when he sold the sculpture to the government. In the alternative, removal was a permissible time, place, and manner restriction rather than content-based suppression.
On the Fifth Amendment, Serra had no protected property interest in permanent display because the contract expressly made the work government property. The administrative hearing the GSA had provided, the court added, was a “gratuitous benefit” exceeding what due process required.
The contract and other claims were dismissed for lack of jurisdiction below and were not challenged on appeal.⁹

The panel made a practical point: Serra could have negotiated contract language guaranteeing permanent display and did not. With that, the GSA was free to proceed.

Removal and Aftermath

Tilted Arc was cut into three pieces and taken off Federal Plaza on March 15, 1989.¹⁰ Diamond told the press: “This is a day for the people to rejoice, because now the plaza returns rightfully to the people.”¹¹

The plates first sat for a decade in a government-owned parking lot at 3rd Avenue and 29th Street in Brooklyn, next to the Metropolitan Detention Center. In 1999 they moved to a GSA depot in Middle River, Maryland, and in 2005 to the GSA’s Fine Art Storage facility in Virginia, where they remain.¹² Serra refused every proposal to reinstall the piece somewhere else. Because it was site-specific, he considered it destroyed the moment it left Federal Plaza.¹⁰ No replacement art was ever installed; the plaza now holds benches and some landscaping.¹³

The personal cost to Serra ran high. He received death threats, and flyers appeared in downtown New York captioned “Kill Serra.” He described the ongoing controversy as an “albatross” that damaged his ability to win domestic commissions for years.⁷

What the Fight Changed

After Tilted Arc, the GSA expanded its Art-in-Architecture procedures to require consultation with local communities before placing art in public spaces.³ Clara Weyergraf-Serra said the case had been used “to rewrite the guidelines” for public art commissions nationwide.⁷

The dispute also helped build momentum for the Visual Artists Rights Act, enacted in 1990. VARA gave visual artists the right to prevent intentional distortion, mutilation, or destruction of works of recognized stature.¹⁴ The Act did not apply retroactively to Tilted Arc, which predated it, and its protections are limited by the property-focused framework of American law. Whether it would have saved the sculpture is a question the statute does not squarely answer.

The Second Circuit’s ruling remains the case’s most durable legal legacy. Its holding that an artist who sells a work to the government retains no constitutional right to control its display continues to shape public art law and gets cited in disputes over site-specificity, government speech, and the exposure of commissioned public art to political and popular pressure.⁹

1
Harriet F. Senie. Tilted Arc Controversy: The Public Policy Context
2
Artist Rights. Serra v. U.S. General Services Administration
3
Artforum. Tilted Arc Hearing
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WNYC. Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
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NPR. Looking Back on the Life and Legacy of Sculptor Richard Serra
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PBS. Tilted Arc
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Metropolis. Conversations About Sculpture: Richard Serra
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The Washington Post. Judge Rules Against Sculptor
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Legal Information Institute. Serra v. U.S. General Services Administration, 847 F.2d 1045
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Tate. Lost Art: Richard Serra
11
Smithsonian American Art Museum. Maquette for Tilted Arc
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Greg.org. The History of Tilted Arc Is Long
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Artnet News. Richard Serra Tilted Arc
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Houston Law Review. Moral Rights in America: Mitigating the Economic Impact of the Visual Artists Rights Act