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.

“They had had” features an image from After Dark Magazine. In the artist’s own words, “The text is a Henry James quote from The Golden Bowl that reads, ‘They had had fears just as they had had joys.’ I flipped it, because I wanted to give these guys their joys before their fears. I don’t expect people to get all of that, but I hope it resonates with the tone of loss and of that journey.”