NADA Miami 2023

Joe Mama-Nitzberg adopts and adapts found images from “high” and “low” culture, “mainstream” and “sub-” culture, and images of the famous and the anonymous. The affectively layered works presented at NADA Miami confront loss (from the AIDS epidemic especially), nostalgia, semiotic literacy, technology, and identity with the artist’s trademark sense of humor. Each pairs source imagery—from After Dark magazine; of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and their audiences; of key works from the history of photography and conceptual art—with found or composed texts in strategies drawn from the Pictures Generation and their forebears. These pictures draw on deep respect for their subjects and a lifetime of consideration of their importance while acknowledging knotty feelings about fame, representation, tragedy, aging, and cultural obsolescence.

Judy Garland—her biography and her function as queer cultural icon—is a recurring subject in Mama- Nitzberg’s work. In Queer Theory, Mama-Nitzberg adopts a photograph of Garland and Barbra Streisand on the Judy Garland Show in 1963, obscuring their faces with colored dots and borrowing a trope from John Baldessari in order to express the artist’s interest in what he describes as “equalizing the anonymous with those of note.” The work is bisected along a vertical axis in a nod to the mirroring and doubling we experience when we express allegiance to cultural icons and navigate the complications of identity.