B. 1942 - Joe Brainard was born in Salem, Arkansas, in 1942, but shortly thereafter his family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up. From an early age Joe showed artistic talent, winning virtually every art contest he entered. He even designed his mother's dresses.

Artistic talent seemed to run in the family. His paternal grandfather wrote poetry, his father drew and painted (until the obligation of supporting a family turned that into a fading dream), and two of Joe's three siblings became artists, aided by private art lessons. After graduation and a few months of study at the Dayton Art Institute, which had given him a full scholarship, Joe moved, in late 1960 or early 1961, to New York City.

Joe's drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University Art Museum, and the Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California, San Diego, as well as in many private and corporate collections. His work is now represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which mounted a retrospective of his work in 1997, followed by a smaller show six months later. In February of 2001, a major traveling retrospective, consisting of approximately 160 pieces, opened at the Berkeley Museum of Art.