Andres Serrano

Born in New York City in 1950, Serrano is the son of a Honduran father, who abandoned the family, and an African-Cuban mother, who did not speak English. Serrano developed an early interest in art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and began to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum School at the age of seventeen. While there he discovered photography, but after two years abandoned his formal education due to a drug addiction, and stopped creating art for several years. In the late 1970s, Serrano was able to break his drug dependency and return to photography. After five years of street portraits and landscapes, Serrano produced his first major series that merged his interest in Catholicism and his interest in Dada and Surrealist art. In 1985 he began a series of works that incorporated human bodily fluids, and in 1987 he created what has become his signature image, Piss Christ. In 1990 Serrano began a series of portraits of homeless men and women, members of the Klan, and Catholic clerics. In 1992, Serrano investigated the issues of death and violence in a series of photographs taken in a morgue. More recently he created a series of photographs entitled the History of Sexuality.