Joe Brainard’s surprising letters

The American artist and author Joe Brainard (1942–1994) stood out with his strikingly unique style of writing, manifested among other ways in his many years of correspondence with other well-known artists and writers. Selections from his letters have now been published in a new volume with comments and analyses by Daniel Kane, professor of American literature
at Uppsala University.

"Brainard was an obsessive letter writer throughout his life, and he always had an idea of publishing his correspondence for a wider audience. With Love, Joe, I’m going some way to fulfilling his wish," says Daniel Kane, who has made the selection and provided analysis in the collection Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard.

Joe Brainard was a central figure in New York's cultural life from the early 1960s through the 1990s. As a visual artist, he worked across a wide range of media. As a writer, he wrote poems, diaries prose, and the experimental memoir I Remember.

Writes to John Asbery and Andy Warhol

The research behind Love, Joe is based on personal letters written between 1959 and 1993. The letters reveal Joe Brainard's creative process and the joys, passions, and struggles of his private life. He writes to poets like John Ashbery and Alice Notley, artists including Andy Warhol and Alex Katz, patrons, high school friends, and fans.

"The letters show that Joe Brainard was an important writer and artist at a time when New York City was seen as the central place for the literary and visual art avant-gardes. Much of his work from this period reflects his sexuality, making him a pioneer for the gay liberation movement of the later 1960s and 1970s," says Daniel Kane.

Exclamation marks, SIGH!s and GULP!s

According to Kane, the letters offer the reader unprecedented insight into how Brainard’s art was created. He describes Brainard’s unique way of writing and as evidence of the attention that this received at the time, he quotes Brainard’s former lover Keith McDermott. The letters were written “in clear grammar-school caps generously spaced across lined paper and peppered with underlinings, exclamation marks, SIGH!s and GULP!s. . . . Joe misspelled words, drew hearts or rays around the word you and shaky letters to indicate turning into jelly.”

"These kinds of graphic elements,” Kane explains, “combined with Joe Brainard's radical quirkiness, are extremely charming. In my reading of the letters, I have found a sensitivity, kindness, and humility that pushes back against the cliché of artists having big egos. 'I really like your letters – not like anyone else's, as you know!' one of his correspondents wrote to him, and it's not hard to understand why!" says Daniel Kane.

Kane D.; Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard; Columbia University Press, 2024; ISBN: 9780231203425 (print), ISBN: 9780231555043 (digital), https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539631

For more information:

Daniel Kane, professor of American literature at the Department of English, Uppsala University,email: daniel.kane@engelska.uu.se, Phone: 018-471 22 09

About Joe Brainard:

Artist and writer Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a high school student, he served as art editor of The White Dove Review, a poetry journal his friends Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup started in 1958. The magazine published work by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), among other writers affiliated with Donald Allen’s groundbreaking 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry.

Following a brief stint at the Dayton Art Institute, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. Brainard soon became a central figure in the city’s cultural scenes as both a visual artist working in a range of media and the author of poems, journals, prose, and single-sentence “mini-essays.” Much of Brainard’s work beginning in this period reflected his sexuality, placing him in the advance guard of the gay liberation movement of the later 1960s and ’70s.