Joseph Clark Collection

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Photography, appropriated imagery and text

Joe Mama-Nitzberg is an American artist based in Catskill, New York, who pairs found images from magazines, popular culture and art history with quotations and text, often addressing queer history and loss from the AIDS epidemic. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

In the collection

They had had, 2021Archival inkjet print in custom painted frame

About the artist

Joe Mama-Nitzberg grew up in Santa Clara, California, graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in 1989 and took an MFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1995. He then worked in the music industry for about eight years, at Geffen, Interscope and Arista, before moving to Catskill, New York, with his partner Marc Swanson in 2014 (The Collaborative).

He adopts and adapts found images from "high" and "low", mainstream and subcultural sources, pairing them with found or composed texts; the works Grant Wahlquist Gallery showed at NADA Miami 2023 dealt with loss from the AIDS epidemic, nostalgia, technology and identity (NADA). Many draw on After Dark, a magazine that ran from 1968 to 1983, and They had had (2021) reverses a line from Henry James's The Golden Bowl so that the joys come before the fears (Interview Magazine).

He has had solo exhibitions at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Basilica Hudson, Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels and Marc Foxx in Los Angeles, and has shown at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Renaissance Society in Chicago and White Columns in New York. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center (Grant Wahlquist Gallery).

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

In the collection

About the artist

Sources

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