John Waters burst into American consciousness in 1972 with the riotously transgressive film Pink Flamingos. In the decades since, his career as a filmmaker has run parallel to his work as a writer, performer, and visual artist.John Waters: Indecent Exposure is the most comprehensive retrospective of Waters’s gallery-based art to date, spanning more than 160 photographs, sculptures, and works for audio and video.
Drawing from his experiences with film and his fascination with celebrity, crime, religion, and kitsch, Waters subverts mainstream expectations of visual art, enticing viewers with his astute, provocative, and wickedly funny observations about society.
Waters has been a discriminating collector of contemporary American art for several decades, and his own artwork participates in its traditions. Using shocking but affectionate humor, he disrupts the celebrity-obsessed habits of the mass media, embracing the lowbrow against the sanctified hypocrisy of “good taste.” Whether it’s sending up the cults of Jackie Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Charles Manson, or the movie stars whose images he gleefully deforms,Indecent Exposure lovingly assaults popular culture, Hollywood, and the presumed “innocence” of childhood.
Waters has had numerous solo and group exhibitions (including his first one-person museum show here in 1999), and his work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among other institutions. Organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art,John Waters: Indecent Exposure makes its only other stop at the Wex.
