Past Exhibitions

John Waters: Indecent Exposure

Info & Tickets

Line up of John Waters artworks including Lassie, a self portrait, and Justin Bieber

View Gallery

Feb 02, 2019–Apr 28, 2019

Galleries

ADMISSION
Free for members, college students (with valid ID), patrons under 18, active military and veterans
$8 general public
$6 senior citizens (65 and older)
$6 Ohio State faculty and staff (with BuckID)

All visitors are admitted to the exhibition for free on Thursdays after 4 PM and on the first Sunday of each month; admission is also free with a ticket to any same-day Wexner Center event. The exhibition is closed on Mondays.

Please note: You will be asked to check backpacks, large purses and other large bags, and umbrellas before entering the galleries. Click here for full list of policies, including items prohibited in the galleries.

Wexner Center members always enjoy free gallery admission. Not a member?Join now.

Become a Member

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.

Please note: this exhibition contains some mature content.

"Waters celebrates and demands that mainstream society make room for the outcasts and failures, the misfits and miscreants, the people who exist at the margins."

BALTIMORE SUN

Tag(s)

Exhibitions

John Waters: Indecent Exposure is organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Kristen Hileman, Senior Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Wexner Center for the Arts’ presentation is organized by Curator at Large Bill Horrigan.

SUPPORT FOR FREE AND LOW-COST PROGRAMS AT THE WEXNER CENTER
Huntington Bank
Cardinal Health Foundation

GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT FOR THE WEXNER CENTER
Greater Columbus Arts Council
Ohio Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Nationwide Foundation