Joe Brainard was born March 11, 1941 in Salem, Arkansas and spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 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 magazine The White Dove Review. He joined them in New York City around 1961, 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 artworld in the early 1980s.

Brainard died of AIDS-induced pneumonia May 25, 1994.

Visual & 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:

Brainard knew and admired Warhol (Brainard sat for a Warhol screen test in 1964) . . . but he was never a Pop artist in the strict sense. Warhol and Lichtenstein maintained an ironic distance from their subject matter. Brainard's relationship to the material world of popular culture was one of affection oramusement or both. Moreover, he was too protean to be stuck with Pop or any other label. In what now would be considered Postmodern fashion, he drew his materials and images from everywhere.

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:

Joe Brainard is one of those unclassifiable artists . . . who do several things well. In his case this resulted not in separate compartments but a unified whole . . . . The same qualities shine forth in all that he produced: clarity, bold simplicity, accuracy of execution and feeling, humor, casual elegance, a charm that invites his audience in rather than keeping them at arm's length, and something grander but determinedly low key and offhand, a sense of the ordinary as sacramental.

Particularly in this collages, drawings and small works on paper, Brainard transformed the everyday into something revelatory:

[Brainard] seems to have been drawn to forms of containment, in which the unruly or rupturing experiences of life are brought into the kind of reductive clarity that we often associate with classical modalities . . . . Not surprisingly, along with this gift for distillation, Brainard had an uncanny eye for essential, revelatory detail; these contribute to the vivid immediacy and spontaneity of his work. In essence, such specific distillations can be understood as a form of abstraction, not the abstraction we affiliate with non-representational art, but something perhaps closer to the poetics we have come to associate with the New York School of poetry: an "aesthetics of attention" as critic Marjorie Perloff has said about its most important avatar, Frank O'Hara . . . . Distillation, specificity, and a keen sense of intimate scale allowed Brainard to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary and, curiously, something like the reverse; he could, with Nancy's help, make the extraordinary seem ordinary.

I Remember

Joe Brainard’s I Remember radically departs from the conventions of the traditional memoir. It is neither chronological nor thematic; rather, each sentence begins “I remember” and is followed by a single memory delivered with uniform weight and declaration. His deft juxtapositions of the banal with the revelatory, the very particular with the seemingly universal accumulate into a complex portrait of his childhood in the 40s and 50s in Oklahoma as well as his life as an artist and gay man in the 60s and 70s in New York City.

I Remember has inspired many homages, none more notable than OuLiPian Georges Perec’s Je me souviens which was dedicated to Brainard. Poet Kenneth Koch was the first to utilize “I remember” in the classroom as a prompt in teaching children to write poetry. The simplicity of the form has had great appeal to both writers and teachers, and most who use it are unaware of its origins.

Publications

• I Remember (Angel Hair, 1970)
• 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)
• I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1972)
• The Friendly Way (Siamese Banana, 1972)
• More I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1973)
• I Remember Christmas (Museum of Modern Art, 1973)
• New Work (Black Sparrow, 1973)
• I Remember (first collected edition, Full Court Press, 1975)
• 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)
• I Remember (new edition, Penguin, 1995)
• Ten Imaginary Still Lifes (Boke Press, 1995)
• I Remember (new edition, Granary Books, 2001, 4th printing 2005)
• The Nancy Book (Siglio Press, 2008) ISBN 978-0979956201
• Briefly noted in The New Yorker 84/35 (3 November 2008) : 111

Collaborative Work

• The Baby Book (Boke Press, 1965), with Kenward Elmslie
• Bean Spasms (Kulchur, 1967) with Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett
• The 1967 Game Calendar (Boke Press, 1967), with Kenward Elmslie
• 100,000 Fleeing Hilda (Boke Press, 1967), with Ron Padgett
• The Drunken Boat (privately printed, nd), with Ted Berrigan
• The Champ (Black Sparrow, 1968), with Kenward Elmslie
• Album (Kulchur, 1969), with Kenward Elmslie
• Recent Visitors (Best & Co./Boke Press, 1971), with Bill Berkson
• Sufferin’ Succotash/Kiss My Ass (Adventures in Poetry, 1971), with Ron Padgett/Michael Brownstein)
• Self-Portrait (Siamese Banana, 1972) with Anne Waldman
• Shiny Ride (Boke Press, 1972), with Kenward Elmslie
• The Class of ‘47 (Bouwerie Editions, 1973; SUNY Buffalo Art Gallery, 2007), with Robert Creeley
• The Vermont Notebook (1975), with John Ashbery
• I Love You, de Kooning (Bolinas, Calif.: Yanagi Broadside late 1970s), with Bill Berkson
• 1984 Comics (Marz Verlag, 1983), 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 Towle
• Sung Sex (Kulchur, 1989), with Kenward Elmslie
• Pay Dirt (Bamberger Books, 1992), 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.

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. He also did sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.