Andres Serrano will present the annual Georges Lurcy Lecture Nov. 23 at 2 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Serrano is the photographer who touched off a firestorm of controversy with Piss Christ (1988), a large color photograph depicting a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Serrano's Piss Christ raised the ire of numerous religious and secular groups, including the American Family Association, and brought condemnation from U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. It also heated up the debate over whether the federal government should fund such artwork. Serrano had received in 1988 a $15,000 grant from Awards in the Visual Arts, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Four years earlier, Serrano had his first brush with censorship with his photograph Stigmata of a nude female with white leather cuffs and bloodied hands. The photo placed in the window of a Soho gallery brought objections from neighbors. The ensuing controversy resulted in the photograph being turned around so that it was only visible from inside the gallery.
A decade after that first episode, controversy continued to follow Serrano. In 1994 an NEA grant that was earlier approved by a peer panel was denied by the National Council on the Arts, an advisory board to the NEA.
In recent years, Serrano has turned his lens on people who are marginalized. His images in the Morgue, Nomads and Budapest series capture the dignity of the homeless and of society's other outcasts.
The Georges Lurcy Lecture Series was established in 1994 by a grant from the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust. The annual lecture series brings to campus luminaries in the art world, whether they be artists, administrators, scholars or writers. Previous lecturers were the historian Robert Rosenblum (1994) and Robert Storr, curator with the Museum of Modern Art.