John Waters’s campy classic film Pink Flamingos (1972), a transgressive tale of a competition for the title “Filthiest People Alive”, is anything but G-rated. But the artist and filmmaker showed a new version of the flick in his 2015 solo exhibition at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York that he says might be even more perverse. Kiddie Flamingos (2014) features children, clad in messy wigs and costumes, reading all of the roles in an adapted script as Waters audibly gives directions off-camera. The 72-minute film will be screened on a continual loop this autumn (21 September-22 January 2017) in the Black Box gallery of the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland—Waters’s hometown, where Pink Flamingos premiered. The pint-sized performers in Kiddie Flamingos—who also hail from Baltimore—“display their own sincerity and delight as they make their way through a deeply unconventional narrative”, Kristen Hileman, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art, said in a statement. The Baltimore Museum of Art also plans to include Kiddie Flamingos in a retrospective on Waters due to open in autumn 2018.
