Jack Waters
Co-Founder/Director
Artist, Film Maker, Curator, Administrator. Jack has exhibited at the Whitney Museum and The National Gallery of Art. He is a subject of an Oral history by the Smithsonian Institution and is archived at the Fales Collection of the NYU Bobst Library.
Jack Waters co-founded Allied Productions, Inc. in 1981 upon realizing that his practice of mixing diverse creative forms would be best facilitated by fusing his interest in collaboration and social process with how his art is realized. He developed organizing skills as a teenager with a pedagogically-based training emphasizing movement as a creative practice as opposed to the primarily interpretive function to which dancers are generally consigned. As a young choreographer he was responsible for organizing productions, scheduling rehearsals, and teaching classes. In addition to stagecraft and production skills, he learned photography, visual art, motion picture production, and a wide range of fine art techniques among the media incorporated into the “total theater'“ of the German Expressionist influence of this early training.
Jack is a multiple Yaddo Fellow who works in all forms of visual, performance and media art. He is a BFA graduate in dance of the Juilliard School. His choreography credits include his Personifications staged for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center Repertory Workshop, and his works created as a founding member of POOL, the choreographer’s collective that was the resident dance company of the legendary Pyramid Club in New York City of the 1980s.
Among Jack’s recent exhibitions is the 2009 three-person show Triple Threat at Frise, the gallery and artist cooperative in Hamburg, Germany.
His current project is Pestilence, a three-part opus bringing together music, oratory and media-driven narrative. Development on Pestilence began in residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy and continues as a work in process, most recently at Berlin.Temps in Germany, and at the Living Theater in New York City.
Jack’s films have shown on Sundance Channel, and on PBS. In 1995 Jack’s film The Male Gayze was shown in the cinema section of the exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity In American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His film/video work is viewable at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, at the Donnell Media Center of the NYC Public Library at Lincoln Center, and archived at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections. Among Waters’ recent screenings of note is his video short Occupy My Ass, Not Iraq at the Panorama section of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival.
From 2002 to 2004 he was Assistant Professor of Video at Hampshire College where he taught Film, Video, and Media. Jack’s other teaching credits include originating the A Different Take media workshop for Mix NYC.
His essays and reviews have been published in Conde Nast’s Brides Magazine, the Village Voice, Springer Magazine in Vienna, and Starship Magazine in Berlin. He was a founding contributing writer for both Gay City News, New York City’s LGBT news bi-weekly, and Color Life, the news journal for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and two-spirited people of Color.
Waters and partner Peter Cramer, former co-directors of ABC No Rio, are co-founders of Le Petit Versailles, a GreenThumb garden presenting screenings, music, performance, visual art exhibitions, and new media. They are ongoing and frequent collaborators with the Inbred Hybrid Collective, whose mandate is “to stimulate a consciousness of the external factors affecting our human existence.” The type of interventions associated with The Inbred Hybrid Collective, achieved as artistic concept, constitute a provocation for the public to reflect upon the influence that this immersion has had upon them.