Joe Mama-Nitzberg
They had had, 2021
- Medium
- Archival inkjet print in custom painted frame
- Dimensions
- 24.75 × 34.875 × 1.5 in. (as listed by NADA, including custom frame)
- Edition
- Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Joseph Clark Collection · JCC-0065
About the work
Mirrored figures, vivid colour and fragments of a sentence meet in They had had. Joe Mama-Nitzberg reworks an image from After Dark magazine, overlaying bodies with circles and placing joy and fear in an unsettled relationship. The text draws on Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, reversing the sequence of those emotions. Photography and language become ways of approaching queer memory, intimacy and loss, while the painted frame extends the image’s colour into the space around it. The work allows humour, desire and tenderness to coexist without settling their tensions.
About the artist
Joe Mama-Nitzberg works across photography, collage, text and sculptural display. His images connect personal memory with queer cultural history, popular entertainment, literature and the language of advertising. Humour, tenderness and grief coexist in works that ask how images preserve people and experiences while also changing their meaning.
He received a BA from San Francisco State University in 1989 and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, in 1995. His exhibitions have included presentations at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Basilica in Hudson, Galerie Catherine Bastide in Brussels and Marc Foxx in Los Angeles. His work is held by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Appropriation is central to his method. Found photographs, art-historical references and fragments of language are brought together without resolving all their associations. His 2019 exhibition A Study in Temperament drew on After Dark magazine, modernist painting, digital culture and memories of loss.