Daniel Kane (editor)

Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard

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An artist and writer whose charming and inventive works are at once modest and ambitious, Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City's vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New York School–aligned poetry to Pop Art–adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. His art drew on the everyday and popular culture, exuding a sense of amiability, wit, and generosity.

Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard's letters stretching from 1959 to 1993, offering an intimate view of his personal and artistic life. They allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York's history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. Brainard's letters to his partner, Kenward Elmslie, and others also open a window onto the transformations of queer life during this period. His correspondents include poet and artist friends such as John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol, as well as lovers, patrons, high school friends, and fans. At once an insider's view of the art and literary worlds and a revelation of Brainard's creative process, these letters invite readers to share in his radical but gentle candor, his open-mindedness, and a sophisticated naiveté that helped him erase the conventional barriers between art and life.

Editor: Daniel Kane

Hardcover  PUblished November 2024  408 pages

Joe Brainard was the sweetest person I've ever known, and that sweetness radiates from these letters, which are also an essential record of New York's painters and poets from the 1960s to the 1990s. Famous for his writing in I Remember and for his thousands of beautiful collages, Joe was a passionate, original spirit, gifted with a serious naiveté.--Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover

Sometimes published correspondence is uncomfortably revealing, but Joe Brainard's shows that he actually was kind, sweet, funny, generous, humble, intuitive, brilliant, and openhearted. The book's deft editing strategy, which clusters his letters to one friend at a time, shows all sides of his personality. Some friends are great for gossip; others get to the core of his art. At no time is he ever less than engaging. This is a rare compilation of letters you will read from one end to the other.--Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

 

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