Joe Brainard


Joe Brainard was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes. In particular, Brainard broke new ground in using comics as a poetic medium in his collaborations with other New York School poets. He is best known for his memoir I Remember, of which Paul Auster said: "It is... one of the few totally original books I have ever read."
WWW joebrainard.org

Life

Joe Brainard was born on March 11, 1942, in Salem, Arkansas, spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City in 1960. He is the brother of painter John Brainard.
Brainard became friends with Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Ted Berrigan during high school while working on the literary journal The White Dove Review, which was printed five times during 1959/1960. The 18-year-old Brainard joined the journal as its art editor after fellow Central High classmate Padgett sent Brainard an anonymous Christmas card praising his work.
After high school, the artist re-united with the White Dove boys in New York City shortly after leaving the Dayton Art Institute.
By 1964, Brainard had already had his first solo exhibition and was ensconced in a circle of friends that included Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Alex Katz, Edwin Denby, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Virgil Thomson, John Ashbery, among many others. He also began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie which lasted much of his life, despite having other lovers. He found much success as an artist, until he removed himself from the art-world in the early 1980s. He devoted the last years of his life to reading.
Brainard died of AIDS-induced pneumonia on May 25, 1994.

Works

Visual and literary work

Brainard began his career during the early Pop Art era, and while his work has a certain affinity with Pop Art, it does not fit the definition of the genre:
The inimitability of Brainard's work is located partly in its resistance to categorization, in its breadth, and in its rapport with and awe of the quotidian:
Particularly in the collages, drawings and small works on paper, Brainard transformed the everyday into something revelatory:

''I Remember''

Joe Brainard's I Remember radically departs from the conventions of the traditional memoir. His deft juxtapositions of the banal with the revelatory, the very particular with the apparently universal accumulate into a complex depiction of his childhood in the 1940s and '50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the '60s and '70s in New York City. I Remember has inspired many homages and adaptations. As the poet and critic Geoffrey O'Brien wrote in The New York Review of Books, I Remember "revealed as the inventor of an altogether new sort of book. The work eventually became globally popular and a widely used text for writing workshops."

Publications

I Remember
  • * I Remember More
  • * More I Remember More
  • * I Remember Christmas
  • * I Remember
  • * I Remember
  • * I Remember Selected Writings Bolinas Journal Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself The Cigarette Book The Banana Book The Friendly Way New Work 12 Postcards 29 Mini-Essays 24 Pictures & Some Words Nothing to Write Home About Ten Imaginary Still Lifes The Nancy Book The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
  • ''Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard''

Collaborative work

Some Things, with Ron Padgett and Ted BerriganThe Baby Book, with Kenward ElmslieBean Spasms with Ted Berrigan and Ron PadgettThe 1967 Game Calendar, with Kenward Elmslie100,000 Fleeing Hilda, with Ron PadgettThe Drunken Boat, with Ted BerriganThe Champ, with Kenward ElmslieAlbum, with Kenward ElmslieRecent Visitors, with Bill BerksonNeil Young, with Tom ClarkSufferin' Succotash/Kiss My Ass Self-Portrait with Anne WaldmanShiny Ride, with Kenward ElmslieThe Class of '47, with Robert CreeleyThe Vermont Notebook, with John AshberyI Love You, de Kooning, with Bill Berkson1984 Comics, collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, James Schuyler, and Tony TowleSung Sex, with Kenward ElmsliePay Dirt, with Kenward Elmslie

Solo exhibitions

Selected Collections include Berkeley Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Baron Guy de Rothschild, Fogg Museum, Harvard; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Time-Life, Inc,. Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD also has a large archive of works by and about Brainard collected by Robert Butts from 1960 to 1992.
His work in theater included set designs for Frank O'Hara's The General Returns from One Place to Another and LeRoi Jones's The Baptism. Brainard also did sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.