Andres Serrano

(American, born 1950)

Andres Serrano is an American artist known for his large-scale photographs imbued with religious symbolism. Serrano is best known for his image Piss Christ (1987), a now-infamous pictures of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. Serrano’s art brings together spirituality with physicality in a way that has garnered the artist considerable controversy, although it is not always intended to shock. “That’s what happens when you do work that is emotionally provocative, it polarizes people on both sides of the fence,” the artist has said. Born on August 15, 1950 in New York, NY, Serrano is from a Honduran and Afro-Cuban background and was raised by a devout Roman Catholic family. The tenets of Catholicism’s taking the body and blood of Christ has played a major role in Serrano’s artwork. Though he never received a formal art education, he did study at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art during his teenage years. Like Kiki Smith, he often uses bodily fluids—blood, milk, semen—in conjunction with sacred iconography. In 1996, the band Metallica released their album Load which used Serrano’s work Semen and Blood III (1990) as the cover art. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.