Fifteen years of Joe Brainard’s illustrated appropriation of classic comic strip character, Nancy
From 1963 to 1978, Joe Brainard created more than 100 artworks that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into a variety of astonishing situations.
The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.
JOE BRAINARD (1942-1994) left Tulsa at eighteen for New York City and soon became a part of the thriving downtown art scene and the New York School of poets and painters. Over his career, Brainard created a prodigious body of work, distinguished by its rare alchemy of sensuality and precision, sophistication and sweetness. Admired for his writing as well as his visual art, Brainard wrote the legendary and beloved memoir I Remember, which was hailed as a masterpiece by Paul Auster and inspired George Perec's Je me souviens. Brainard's drawings, assemblages, collages, and paintings are in private and museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of America Art, and in 2001 a major retrospective was curated by the Berkeley Art Museum.