OPENING | John Waters: The Worst of Waters
Schedule
Sat Oct 04 2025 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
432 Julia St, New Orleans, LA, United States, Louisiana 70130 | New Orleans, LA
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present "The Worst of Waters", the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition with John Waters. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia St, from October 4 to November 15, 2025. Waters will be present at the opening reception hosted by the gallery on Saturday, October 4, from 6–9 PM, in conjunction with Art for Arts’ Sake. Additionally, the artist will lead a walkthrough of his exhibition on Saturday, October 4, at 1 PM. For over two decades, Arthur Roger Gallery has been home to Waters’ provocative and hilarious explorations of taste, trash, and taboo. In The Worst of Waters, he once again leaves an indelible mark on the cultural landscape–violating our very conception of natural categories and deftly replacing them with his own–namely, the Great, the Glamorous, the Obscure, and the Obscene. In The Worst of Waters, we are treated to the artist’s iconoclastic commentary on topics of public interest, such as pyromania, cosmetic tweakage, and Midwestern torture-murder, to name but a few. Themes and motifs of provocation — race, sex, gender, consumerism, and religion — are unapologetically central to Waters’ practice and presented with his paradigm-jolting brand of wit and cynicism. Lovingly fashioned from pop culture pulp, Waters’ photographs and sculptures adorn the gallery walls like sacred relics of pop culture gone deliciously wrong. In this exhibition, the only thing Waters is guilty of is delightfully bad taste.
Baltimore-based visual artist John Waters (b. 1946) is also renowned as a film director, writer, actor, journalist, and pervert. Waters’ photography, sculptures, and installations have been shown in galleries and museums worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, among many others. His artwork is featured in the permanent collections of several prominent institutions, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2011, Waters was selected as a juror for the Venice Biennale.
There have been five books published on Waters’ visual art practice: Director’s Cut, 1997 (Scalo Books); John Waters: Change of Life, 2004 (Harry N. Abram); Unwatchable, 2006 (Marianne Boesky Gallery and de Pury & Luxembourg); John Waters–How Much Can You Take?, 2015 (Scheidegger & Spiess); and Indecent Exposure, 2018 (University of California Press).
