Andres Serrano is the American artist best known for Piss Christ, the 1980s photograph of a beaker of urine containing an inverted crucifix. Per John Kiriakou, the work “made Ronald Reagan so angry that he cut off funding to the National Endowment for the Arts.” Kiriakou’s gloss: “All it did was it made Andres even more famous.”[1][2]
The Tate Modern torture series
Serrano subsequently photographed Kiriakou as one of a series of subjects in a project on torture chambers and torture around the world. Kiriakou’s portrait is held in the permanent collection of Tate Modern, London. Per Kiriakou: “It’s in a series of pictures from torture chambers around the world, and it’s in the Tate Modern. In London. Isn’t that hilarious? And it’s next to like this — a torturer from the US military.”[2][3]