No Ordinary Joe

Joe Brainard had a reputation for being sweet. Contemporaries of the visual artist and poet often sidelined his accomplishments to speak or write about his interpersonal kindness. “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist,” claimed his sometimes collaborator John Ashbery. “If many of the people I knew in New York in the seventies were twisted or paranoid or even evil, we all agreed one was a saint: Joe Brainard,” wrote Edmund White in his memoir City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, the rare glowing summation in a book that offers unvarnished depictions of everyone from Jasper Johns to White’s late boyfriend Chris Cox—who, like Brainard, died tragically young due to AIDS.