Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard (March 11, 1942 – May 25, 1994) 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."

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

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 [Brainard] 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 (Angel Hair, 1970) I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1972) More I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1973) I Remember Christmas (Museum of Modern Art, 1973) I Remember (first collected edition, Full Court Press, 1975) I Remember (new edition, Penguin, 1995) I Remember (new edition, Granary Books, 2001, 4th printing 2005) Selected Writings (Kulchur, 1971) Bolinas Journal (Big Sky, 1971) Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (Siamese Banana, 1971) The Cigarette Book (Siamese Banana, 1972) The Banana Book (Siamese Banana, 1972) The Friendly Way (Siamese Banana, 1972) New Work (Black Sparrow, 1973) 12 Postcards (Z Press, 1975) 29 Mini-Essays (Z Press, 1978) 24 Pictures & Some Words (BLT, 1980) Nothing to Write Home About (Little Caesar, 1981) Ten Imaginary Still Lifes (Boke Press, 1995) The Nancy Book (Siglio Press, 2008) The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America, 2012) Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard (Columbia University Press, 2024)

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.