Instagram: @ser_sera
Part poetic, part frenetic, the works of the artist Ser Serpas exemplify the realities of late-stage capitalism and all its attendant messiness. With her work being presented in this year’s triennial at New York’s El Museo del Barrio in the fall, the multi-media artist lets us in on the method to her brilliant madness.
Ser Serpas. huff heavy forget this song the hell I see, 2024. Found objects. Installation view: Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Maxwell Graham, New York
Ser Serpas. I fear (J’ai peur). Installation view: Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, Paris, and Maxwell Graham, New York
Ser Serpas. time is dealing, 2024. Found objects. Installation view: Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Maxwell Graham, New York;
The artist Ser Serpas is on the hunt for Adderall. “I’ve never been on it, but there’s a shortage and I was going to get it!” she says with a laugh over Zoom from her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “I’m not in a rut right now, but I’m kind of like, what am I going to do without it if I’m not moving every few months and finding a new way of working?”
The 29-year-old may at least be partially joking, but her question hints at the unique creative process for which she has become known, as well as a sense that she’s stepping into a mature phase of her career. Her meteoric ascent in the art world coincided with a peripatetic period during which she lived in Geneva, Paris, and Tbilisi, and her pieces have always been readymades, informed by, and sourced directly from, the cities and neighborhoods where they’re shown—not only the street trash she scavenges for to construct her in situ installations, but even the secondhand brushes, paints, and canvases used to make her spectral figurative paintings and visual poems. “It’s been about the studio space I’ve had access to. The rooms I’m in and what materials I have direct access to,” she says.
Now, Serpas has returned to her adopted hometown of New York—the launchpad for her unlikely story—and is getting used to the feeling of being settled. (“I haven’t been on an airplane in months,” she says. “I usually get all my ideas on airplanes.”) Born in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, the nerve center of that city’s activist tradition, and raised by a single mother who works as an administrator for the LAPD, Serpas moved to New York at 18 to attend Columbia, initially pursuing urban studies (she went on to graduate in 2017 with a BA in visual arts). “I thought I was going to do political work,” she says, “but it didn’t turn out that way.” Instead she fell in with a colorful nightlife crowd that orbited around the legendary promoter Susanne Bartsch, for whom she ended up interning. It was during this time that Serpas—born Brandon—changed her name and persona; friends call her Sera, a play on the Spanish expression “que sera sera.” Her first job was at the Chelsea hotel, and she also worked for the dealer Gavin Brown and interned at the Whitney Museum, where, in a full-circle moment, her work featured in this year’s biennial.
Ser Serpas. Photographer Eric McArthur
After traveling to Zurich in 2020 to install a solo show, Serpas felt called to Europe, where she earned her MFA at HEAD Geneva the following year. “Not that they weren’t hustling,” she recalls thinking, “but this is just a different vibe. I should try to have a different pace of life for a second.” The respite didn’t last long. Since graduating, Serpas has had solo exhibitions everywhere, from the Bourse de Commerce in Paris to the Swiss Institute in New York, most assembled entirely by herself following the same process used for her lauded post-Columbia debut at Miami’s Current Projects (now Quinn Harrelson Gallery) in 2017. Here, she created an installation overnight from the contents of a bulky-item pickup pile in front of a foreclosed house. For the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial in 2020, curators were concerned her refuse materials would contaminate other artists’ works, so she was assigned separate areas at the show’s two sites. Ultimately, due to Covid travel restrictions that kept Serpas in Switzerland, museum staff had to gather the objects, which were left unassembled in a grid arrangement and presented with Serpas’s text calling them “the potential for a work or works.” Which is very Serpas, too.
Serpas’s sculptures are precarious in structure and material alike, as in a sweat-stained mattress folded into a slice in an old drywall panel to create a balletically graceful X-shaped form, or a disused chair she torched after splashing it with estradiol, the flammable synthetic estrogen—a sort of anti-self-portrait. She has never reinstalled one, at least not herself. “They’re like balancing acts, so you can never really recreate one,” she explains. Likewise, she has never shown a painting twice. “I don’t really have a trained way to go at a painting. Which I think people appreciate, even if they get fed up with canvases that they have to take care of because they’re already degrading. I find that beautiful, if something made 20 years ago looks 100 years old. I want things to look like antiques.”
Ser Serpas. Untitled, 2023. Oil on wood panel. Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham, New York
This fall, Serpas will be prominently featured in the triennial of New York’s El Museo del Barrio; from her newly rooted mode of preparation she’s looking inward. And, as always, forward. “I’m making a lot of stuff about the floors in my studio,” she says. “Right now I have, like, all this canvas on the floor, so I’m going to make some paintings and use the floor as a giant printing press. I’ll create murals. I thought it would be funny if a Mexican artist made a mural people can step all over. Some kind of Richard Serra-esque stretched canvas paintings that are filled with ash and beer stains and footsteps and paint. I’ll, like, stretch them and make them into architecture. I’ll make walls out of them.”
Her approach is “totally frenetic and out of control and zero attention span,” Serpas continues, nodding to her aforementioned craving for prescription stimulants. “I’ve never been the type of person who is very comfortable presenting a single thing alone. I need to usually present a barrage of things and activity for my work because I’m thinking about it as vignettes. They need to be together to make sense.” Together or individually, her pieces—and the process that births them—seem, as much as those of any working artist, to reify the consciousness of late-stage capitalism; they metabolize and sublimate the waste of a world gone mad.
With space and time to prepare for another show next year at Kunsthalle Basel, Serpas has time to do something she doesn’t usually do—research—and is interested in making more collaborative work, and even films. “A lot of work I like offers suggestions for how to present work in general,” she says. “And that’s what I find more interesting—creating a setting or stage design for other things to inhabit. Maybe that’s how I see my practice, and myself.”
Ser Serpas. Through the loop and the belt, 2019. Car parts, glass, stones, pipes. Installation view: Stars Are Blind, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, 2019. Courtesy of the artist, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, and Maxwell Graham, New York
Ser Serpas. Untitled, 2018. Oil and mixed media on wood, vitrine. Installation view: Hall, Swiss Institute, New York, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Swiss Institute, New York, and Maxwell Graham, New York
Ser Serpas. Installation view: Guesthouse, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, 2021. Courtesy of the artist, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, and Maxwell Graham, New York
Ser Serpas. Installation view: Tool, Maxwell Graham, New York, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Maxwell Graham, New York
