Courageous Conversations with Jack Waters & Peter Cramer at BAAD

Visual AIDS Artist Members Peter Cramer & Jack Waters will be in conversation at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD) for Courageous Conversations - a free community/education forum that is a mix of topical talks and resilience workshops led by leading thinkers and doers from the arts, media and politics, followed by a facilitated/open community conversation. The invited speakers/artists/activists/artivists present work and/or give a talk (essentially we consider it making an offering to the room) on ways they are able to make art, organize, and thrive (and/or struggle), while living upstream in this country (and world).

Our first iteration of the series in 2017 featured poet Pamela Sneed, writer Sarah Schulman, journalist Steven Thrasher, Trans/GNC activists Jamal T. Lewis and Kiara Saint James, poet StaceyAnn Chin, artist Dr. Zanele Muholi, Bronx City Council Member Ritchie Torres, writer Hari Ziyad, blogger/immigrant rights activist Andres Duque with graphic activist Julio Salgado, TV Producer Rose Arce, and others we admire.

Peter Cramer and Jack Waters are artists known for their cross-disciplinary multimedia works that encompass experimental film, documentary, and diaristic approach. After the loss of friends and their own HIV seroconversion diagnosis, they reinvigorated investigation of AIDS, LGBT political struggles, sexual/racial identity and erotic subject in films, videos, performances, and installations. Their work values the process and experience of creation as highly more significant than the final product.

Peter and Jack established Allied Productions Inc, a non profit arts umbrella In 1981, served as directors of ABC No Rio alternative art collective from 1983-1990, and founded Le Petit Versailles (1996) a community garden based in New York City. Residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, Harvestworks, and Yaddo, New York. Collaborations with artists include Kembra Pfahler, Carl George, Barbara Hammer, Geoff Hendricks, Sur Rodney (Sur), Lorraine O’Grady, Stephen Winter and Ethan Shoshan.

Their work has been screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives, MIX NYC, Center for Contemporary Culture (Barcelona, Spain), Frise Künstlerhaus (Hamburg, Germany) and discussed in publication including Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 – 2010 edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski and Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation by Sarah Schulman. Cramer and Waters are also subjects of Art Spaces Archives Project – oral histories conducted by at the Smithsonian Institution/Archives of American Art. Peter is the anonymous #1 interview for the ACT UP Oral History Project, (later included as #50).

Their films have been preserved with the support of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the National Film Preservation Fund, and are available through the Film-makers’ Co-operative, Fales Downtown Collection, Visual AIDS and Allied Productions’ archives. Both Jack and Peter are Visual AIDS artist members, recipients of a 2014 Kathy Acker Award and honored in 2019 by Performance Space New York for their AIDS activism.

In 2014 they started the band NYOBS as an alternative experimental free association “kitchen“ band born at Punk Island and serves as the musical basis for “Pestilence - A History of the World” an opus that will premier at La MaMA ETC next February 2020.