Joe Goode
American, b. 1937
Joe Goode is one of the most inventive and celebrated artists to emerge from the legendary Ferus Gallery generation in Los Angeles. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), where he became part of a circle of artists that would define postwar California art.
Goode first gained widespread recognition in the early 1960s for his iconic Milk Bottle paintings — canvases paired with painted glass milk bottles placed on the floor in front of them — works that playfully interrogated the boundary between painting and sculpture, image and object. These works established him as a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene and brought him international attention.
Over the following decades, Goode developed a remarkably varied practice, moving through torn canvas works, staircase paintings, cloud paintings, and large-scale works on paper. His cloud imagery — rendered in pastel, oil, and mixed media — became one of his most celebrated bodies of work, evoking the atmospheric light and open skies of Southern California with lyrical precision.
Goode's work is characterized by a restless formal intelligence, a wry wit, and a deep engagement with the materiality of painting. His career spans more than six decades of sustained innovation, and his work remains among the most distinctive and beloved in the canon of postwar California art.
Museum Collections
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) • Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) • Whitney Museum of American Art • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) • Orange County Museum of Art