The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, will exhibit Andres Serrano's highly controversial photograph "Piss Christ (Immersions)" from Thursday to November 29. The 1987 work, which depicts a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine, sparked a censorship scandal in 1989 after touring to Richmond, Virginia, leading to U.S. Senate denunciations and cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts. The vandalized version of the piece, damaged by fundamentalist Catholics in Avignon in 2011, is on loan from Vancouver collector Bob Rennie, who purchased it for its "social history." The exhibition also includes two other Serrano works and will be juxtaposed with Salvador Dalí's "Santiago El Grande" in the gallery's Dalí chapel.
This exhibition matters because it revisits a landmark work that helped ignite the 1990s culture wars over arts funding and censorship, a debate that continues to resonate today. By showing the vandalized version, the gallery highlights the physical and political attacks the artwork has endured, framing it as a piece of social history. The display also marks the first time Serrano's work has been shown in Atlantic Canada, and it connects historical controversies to contemporary reactions, as recent Serrano portraits of figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump provoked stronger shock than "Piss Christ" itself.