Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American photographer whose Piss Christ (1987), an image of a crucifix submerged in urine, resulted in a storm of controversy and was a central element in the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and ’90s. The piece and others of a similar confrontational nature caused a reexamination in the United States of funding for the arts.

Serrano studied art, notably photography, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1967–69 and later acknowledged that in the 1970s he was a drug dealer and addict in New York City. He returned to photography in the early 1980s, presenting large-scale colour images concentrating on dramatic and provocative figural compositions. The intensity of these images evoked for the artist the images of Christ’s Passion that he had observed growing up in a Hispanic, Roman Catholic home. An interest in bodily fluids—blood, urine, milk, semen—sometimes in isolation (Milk, Blood, 1986), sometimes combined with cruciform shapes or reproductions of statuary (Blood Cross, 1985), led the artist to create his infamous Piss Christ. This image was exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1988, as part of that institution’s Awards in the Visual Arts series, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Many viewers found the image profane and irreverent and further objected to the support of the NEA, which itself was funded by taxpayers. The public debate engendered by this and other provocative artworks caused Congress to restrict grants to individual visual artists and to cut the NEA’s funding by two-fifths.

In later series studies Serrano employed traditional portraiture strategies to photograph members of the Ku Klux Klan (Klansmen, 1990) and homeless New Yorkers (Nomads, 1990). His Morgue series (1992), which is believed to have been photographed in Paris, studied the heads and bodies of corpses. His other series examine such subjects as Middle America, Catholic lay workers, guns, and human sexuality.

Serrano continued to make art in the 21st century, often photographing objects he had collected, including the signs of homeless New Yorkers ( Signs of the Times, 2013), memorabilia associated with U.S. Pres. Donald Trump (a collection he turned into the book The Game: All Things Trump, 2020), and historical objects related to slavery and racism (Infamous, 2020). In 2022 he debuted his first film, Insurrection, which comprised clips of stock videos combined with live footage of the 2021 United States Capitol attack pulled from public platforms. In addition to photography and film, Serrano also practiced music, assuming the alter ego Brutus Faust to release the album Vengeance Is Mine (2010).