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.

In the artist’s own words, “The base image is a photograph of Judy Garland on stage at her iconic 1961 Carnegie Hall performance bending over to kiss her daughter Liza Minelli who was in the audience. I have obscured their faces with dots. The quote is supposedly from a letter that Christopher Isherwood wrote to Gore Vidal regarding what he saw as the negative fashion that homosexual life was represented in Vidal’s novel ‘The City and the Pillar,’ first published in 1948. By quadrupling, tinting and mirroring the image, I have created several other sides to the picture. Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal and Marcel Proust—these are many sides to this picture, with one overriding cultural angle. My respect for these figures is immense. My thoughts on them and my fandom are a life’s work. But my feelings about fame and representation are complicated. Perhaps this why I have chosen to highlight the anonymous Garland fans. Their side of the picture is one that is often overlooked or thought tragic and retrograde. Perhaps this should be reconsidered.”