ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES OPENS JOHN WATERS: POPE OF TRASH ON VIEW UNTIL AUGUST 4, 2024

 

Portrait of John Waters. Photo by Greg Gorman, ©Academy Museum Foundation

The First Comprehensive Exhibition Dedicated to the Filmmaker’s Contributions to Cinema Includes Never-Before-Shown Objects from Waters’s Films

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the eponymous artist’s contributions to cinema, on September 17, 2023. Exploring his process, themes, and unmatched moviemaking approach, the exhibition traces the grotesque, daring, deliberately tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year filmmaking career and reveals how his movies have redefined independent cinema. A robust film program complementing the exhibition begins with an ultra-rare silent screening of Eat Your Makeup (1968) on September 17 and continues with an extensive retrospective. An adjacent installation, Outside the Mainstream, highlights other radically independent filmmakers who also champion unconventional film production and distribution modes. 

Photo by: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation

John Waters: Pope of Trash is organized by Exhibitions Curator Jenny He and Associate Curator Dara Jaffe, with the support of Research Assistant Emily Rauber Rodriguez and former Curatorial Assistant Esme Douglas. It will be the museum’s third large-scale temporary exhibition, following Hayao Miyazaki (2021–22) and Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 (2022–23) in the museum’s 11,000-square-foot Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery.

On view through August 4, 2024, John Waters: Pope of Trash journeys through Waters’s complete filmography, from his do-it-yourself independent beginnings to his rebellious Hollywood productions, including four shorts and twelve feature films. Collaborating closely with Waters—anointed the “Pope of Trash” by author William S. Burroughs—as well as members of his casts and crews, the co-curators selected more than 400 works for the exhibition, many of which have never been displayed publicly.

Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Jacqueline Stewart said, “I offer my deep gratitude to John for trusting our museum with the formidable endeavor of telling the story of his vast film career. As the subject of numerous exhibitions on his visual art and photography, John is accustomed to the process of exhibition-making. For John Waters: Pope of Trash, he has uniquely plumbed decades of remembrances and searched high and low—literally attics and basements— for the works seen in this exhibition.”

“Known for pushing the boundaries of ‘good taste,’ Waters has created a canon of high shock-value, high-entertainment movies that have cemented his position as one of the most revered independent auteurs in the history of American movies,” said Academy Museum Exhibitions Curator Jenny He and Associate Curator Dara Jaffe. “Waters’s subversive audacity is matched only by his loving treatment of his characters. His cinematic worlds—consistently set in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland—are absent of mean spirit, which could account for his current phase of respectability, garnered despite decades of gleefully making ‘trash’ films.” 

Photo by/ Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION AND HIGHLIGHTS
Visitors enter the exhibition through an introductory gallery featuring an abstracted chapel setting that winks at several aspects of Waters’s personal history and filmmaking. A gallery exploring the filmmaker’s early life and works includes Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964)—Waters’s first film, an 8mm short made when he was 17 years old—as well as Roman Candles (1967). These films, in addition to Eat Your Makeup (1968), Mondo Trasho (1969), and The Diane Linkletter Story (1970), have been restored by the Academy Film Archive for the exhibition with film materials on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for the latter three.

For more information on the exhibit visit the Academy Museum link HERE.