Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano (b. 1950, New York) is an American artist who studied painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum in 1967–69 and later acknowledged that in the 1970s he was an addict and drug dealer in New York City. He turned to photography in the early 1980s, presenting large-scale color 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, N.C., in 1988 as part of that institution’s Awards in the Visual Arts series, funded in part by the American 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 the US Congress to restrict grants to individual visual artists and to cut the NEA’s funding by two-fifths. (Encyclopedia Britannica)