Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987.
Photo Credit: wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

This recorded interview of Andres Serrano by Robert Hobbs is provided here as a replay as part of our Legacy Series made possible by permission of the Smithsonian whose Archives of American Art retains the historic archive of recordings and papers of Artists Talk on Art.

Free & Open to the Public | Hosted on Zoom

Host: Kristin Eichenberg

More Information:

Immersion (Piss Christ) is a controversial 1987 photograph by the American artist and photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a small glass tank of the artist's urine. The piece was a winner of a contest that was sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a U. S. agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects. It caused a furor that firmly established Serrano as one of the 'bad boys' of the art world.

Andres Serrano is an American artist who is notorious for the controversial content of his photographic works. His best-known pieces are large format images of objects often religious in nature and studio portraiture. These included submerging a crucifix in urine, taking photographs of recently deceased bodies just brought into a city morgue, and producing portraits of members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Robert Carleton Hobbs is an art historian and curator specializing in twentieth-century art. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts Virginia Commonwealth University, a highly ranked art department. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University. He has held positions at Cornell University, University of Iowa, Florida State University and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran, and is known for a number of books, in-depth essays, and exhibitions. He has produced monographs of Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, Mark Lombardi, Robert Smithson, and Kara Walker.