Joe Brainard
Encyclopedia
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.”
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 journal The White Dove Review. 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 artworld in the early 1980s.
Brainard died of AIDS-induced pneumonia May 25, 1994.
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 this collages, drawings and small works on paper, Brainard transformed the everyday into something revelatory:
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.
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 1960-1992.
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. He also did sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
. 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
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...
said: “It is…one of the few totally original books I have ever read.”
Life
Joe Brainard was born March 11, 1941 in Salem, ArkansasSalem, Arkansas
Salem is the name of four places in the U.S. state of Arkansas:*Salem, Fulton County, Arkansas, a city in northern Arkansas*Salem, Ouachita County, Arkansas*Salem, Pike County, Arkansas...
and spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and 46th-largest city in the United States. With a population of 391,906 as of the 2010 census, it is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area, a region with 937,478 residents in the MSA and 988,454 in the CSA. Tulsa's...
. He is the brother of painter John Brainard. Brainard became friends with Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Bean Spasms, Padget's first collection of poems, was published in 1967 and written with Ted Berrigan...
, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
during high school while working on the literary journal The White Dove Review. 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
Dayton Art Institute
The Dayton Art Institute is a museum of fine arts in Dayton, Ohio, USA. The Dayton Art Institute was rated one of the top 10 best art museums in the United States for kids. The museum also ranks in the top 3% of all art museums in North America in 3 of 4 factors...
.
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
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
, Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...
, Edwin Denby
Edwin Denby
Edwin Denby may refer to:* Edwin Denby , U.S. poet, novelist, dance critic* Edwin Denby , U.S. politician, Secretary of Navy, noted in the Teapot Dome Scandal...
, Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter was an American painter and art critic. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus....
, James Schuyler
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem...
, Jane Freilicher, Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
, John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, among many others. He also began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie
Kenward Elmslie
Kenward Gray Elmslie is an American writer, performer, editor and publisher associated with the New York School of poetry.-Life and career:...
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 ArtPop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine 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 or
amusement 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 PerloffMarjorie PerloffMarjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
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
Oulipo
Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
Georges Perec
Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He is a member of the Oulipo group...
’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
| 2008 | The Nancys, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York The Nancys, Colby College, Waterville, ME |
| 2007 | The Erotic Work, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Joe Brainard: People of the World: Relax! UBA Art Galleries, Buffalo, NY "If Nancy Was...", Fischbach Gallery, NY |
| 2005 | 35 Pictures and Some Words, Brazos Project, Houston, TX |
| 2004 | Selected Work, Tbor de Nagy Gallery, New York |
| 2001 | Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; traveled to Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV Selected Work, Tibor de Nagy, New York |
| 1997 | A Retrospective, Tibor de Nagy, New York |
| 1987 | SMandeville Gallery, University of California, San Diego, CA |
| 1980 | Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA |
| 1978 | Joe Brainard: Fête d’Hiver, Root Art Center, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY |
| 1976 | FIAC, Paris, France Coventry Gallery, Paddington, Australia Suzette Schochett Gallery, Newport, RI E.G. Gallery, Kansas City, KS Vick Gallery, Philadelphia, PA |
| 1975 | Fischbach Gallery, New York; also 1974, 1972 and 1971 |
| 1973 | 102 Works on Paper, 1966–1972, Utah Museum of FIne Arts, Salt Lake City, UT |
| 1972 | New York Cultural Center, New York School of Visual Arts, New York |
| 1971 | Gotham Book Mart and Gallery, New York; also 1968 |
| 1970 | Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago, IL |
| 1969 | Landau-Alan Gallery, New York; also 1967 |
| 1968 | Jerold-Morris Gallery, Toronto, Canada |
| 1965 | The Alan Gallery, New York |
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 1960-1992.
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. He also did sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.