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ABOUT JOE BRAINARD
During his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a gentle, skinny stutterer who won virtually every art competition he entered and eagerly designed his mother's dresses at her request. In high school he met the equally marginalized young poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, and the three published The White Dove Review that featured work by Beat and Black Mountain luminaries and an unknown Ted Berrigan who soon became a close friend.
In late 1960 Joe abandoned a full scholarship at the Dayton Art Institute to move to New York City and live a poor artist's life on the Lower East Side, often subsisting on little but coffee and cigarettes. By 1964, after a lonely but revelatory year in Boston, Joe was back in New York, ensconced in a circle of friends that included renowned and highly regarded artists, writers, and composers, as well a host of younger poets later associated with the St. Marks Poetry Project. He also came to terms with being gay and began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie that, despite other lovers, lasted until the end of his life.
1964 also marked the advent of Joe's artistic success. His first solo exhibition came on the heels of being chosen by Larry Rivers for a group show. For the next fifteen years, in addition to showing his work across the country and internationally to critical acclaim, Joe continued designing book covers for and collaborating with his poet friends, as well as designing sets and costumes for theatrical productions. His own writings -- memoirs, short essays, verbal-visual hybrids, and poems -- were published in small offset and mimeo editions as well as by independent presses Kulchur, Angel Hair, Z Press, and Black Sparrow.
Joe's work ethic and singleness of purpose -- as well as his use of amphetamines -- allowed him to produce art at an astonishing rate. His prodigious output, however, did not diminish the quality of work that critics noted then and continue to recognize for its dazzling beauty, its extraordinary variety and originality, its vitality and wit. For the last fifteen years of his life, before he died of AIDS-induced pneumonia, Joe refused almost every invitation to exhibit or publish. Dissatisfied with his work and wary of complacency, Joe spent his time living a life that demonstrated the same generosity, passion, and sense of purpose that marked his art by devoting himself to reading, to seeing exhibitions and movies, and to his friends.
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Special Offer
Every order (until we run out)
will receive a set of twelve different
cards that reproduce the
ink drawings from Joe Brainard's
1974 "IF." Not for sale and available nowhere else!
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