John Boskovich, Rude Awakening Series: For Larry Johnson: Another Original Idea, Another Risky Persona, 1997, Courtesy of the Estate of John Boskovich
Larry Johnson, Untitled (Study for L + R), 2020, Courtesy of the Artist
Joe Mama Nitzberg, Untitled (Gertrude by Carl with Rainbow), 2018, Courtesy of the Artist
This presentation brings together works by John Boskovich, Larry Johnson, and Joe Mama Nitzberg to trace a lineage of gay conceptual practices in Los Angeles. It resists erasure by foregrounding wit, loss, and coded language as strategies through which queer histories persist—fragile, dispersed, yet insistently present.
John Boskovich (1956–2006) was a Los Angeles–based artist whose work moved between installation, video, and sculpture. His practice engaged questions of power, authorship, and identity, often inflected by the AIDS crisis and the politics of representation, using irony and restraint to probe systems of belief and control.
Larry Johnson (b. 1959) utilizes appropriated text and imagry and examine celebrity, language, and queer identity. Emerging from the Pictures Generation, his practice combines deadpan humor with cultural critique, foregrounding the slippage between public persona, desire, and authorship.
Joe Mama Nitzberg (b. 1965) is a NY-based artist whose work embraces camp, excess, and queer theatricality, constructing irreverent and often surreal worlds that challenge dominant narratives around taste, sexuality, and artistic legitimacy
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