Andres Serrano

(New York, New York, 1950 - )

American

Born in 1950 in New York into a Catholic family, Serrano is the son of an Afro-Cuban mother and Honduran father. In 1967, at the age of 17, he attended the Brooklyn Museum School and studied painting for two years before turning to photography. In 1985, Serrano participated in the National Studio Program at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Long Island City, NY.

Serrano’s photography has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his work is included in many significant international collections, including Vatican Contemporary Art Collection, Vatican, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Smithsonian Archives, Washington D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York.

In 1988, Serrano's photograph Piss Christ, which depicts a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine, was included in a group exhibit at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, an institution partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The subsequent crusade against the NEA was led by Senator Jesse Helms, who called the work of Serrano "immoral trash." The battle over NEA funding continued in the 1990s with the culture wars, eventually leading to the elimination of NEA individual artist grants. Serrano’s work continued to focus on subjects traditionally considered objectionable and socially extreme, including portraits of Ku Klux Klan members and close-ups of corpses in the morgue.

New York, New York

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