Joe Brainard
1942–1994 · American artist and writer of the New York School
Joe Brainard (Salem, Arkansas, 1942 – New York, 1994) was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His work includes collages, assemblages, drawings, paintings, book and record cover designs, and theatre sets and costumes. He pioneered the use of comics as a poetic medium, collaborating with poets he admired, and is best known for his memoir I Remember.
He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a family of artists. During high school he worked on the literary magazine The White Dove Review, and in the early 1960s he moved to New York. By 1965 he had held his first exhibition and belonged to a circle of poets and painters that included Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch. He showed at New York galleries and at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. Around the early 1980s he withdrew from the art world, spending his last years reading and making personal works for close friends.
I Remember departs from the conventional memoir: through the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the revealing, it describes his childhood in Oklahoma and his life in New York. Its form inspired Georges Perec, Luis Alberto de Cuenca and other writers, and in 1998 the filmmakers David Chartier and Avi Zev Weider adapted the book into a short film. He died in 1994 of an AIDS-related pneumonia.