Joe Brainard - Frank Bidart Collection

Born in Arkansas in 1942 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. A writer and an artist, he became associated with the New York School circle of poets. His work has been included in a number of gallery and museum exhibition across the United States such as MoMA P.S.1 and the Berkeley Art Museum and is in many notable private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of America Art, the Colby College Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  He published more than a dozen books, including the prose-poem memoir series I Remember (1975) and The Nancy Book (2008), also providing illustrations and cover art for fellow poets in his circle. One of Brainard’s most frequent collaborators was his longtime partner, the writer Kenward Elmslie.

The items in this catalogue are all from the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.