Andres Serrano was born in 1950 in New York City. He attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969, where he studied painting and sculpture. Andres Serrano’s name, along with Robert Mapplethorpe’s, was at the crossroads of the 1989 Cultural Wars when Serrano’s photograph, ‘Piss Christ’ became the subject of a national debate on freedom of artistic expression and the public funding of controversial art. ’Piss Christ’ an ethereal image of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, remains the artist’s most controversial and misunderstood work.
Serrano has also created ‘The Morgue’ an investigation of death, as well as photographed numerous subjects including the Ku Klux Klan, the homeless, and ‘America’ a panorama of American society.
Andres Serrano is an internationally acclaimed American artist whose work has been shown in major institutions in the United States and abroad. His photographs are in numerous museums and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, Holland; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; capc musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain, Cluny, France; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid Spain; Cintas Foundation, Miami, FL; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Allen Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia.