From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard (author of I Remember) created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence.
In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality. A beguiling balance of mischief and innocence, irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation, Brainard's Nancys accumulate into a complex work of great originality and wit, equal parts surprise and subtlety.
The Nancy Book includes 78 full page reproductions in color and b/w and features collaborations with poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. The Nancy Book also includes a reminiscence by Ron Padgett as well as an original essay by Ann Lauterbach that locates, with poetic and critical acumen, the matrix of relationships that informed Brainard s work, illuminating the Nancy works in particular.
