Joe Goode was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1937. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961.
First recognized for his Pop Art milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 ground-breaking exhibit New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition was the first museum Pop Art exhibition in the United States.
Through the years, Goode has combined various traditional and non-traditional media in the creation of his artwork. He has explored images which project a way of seeing "in and out" and "up and down" as well as things that can be see through: milk bottles, oceans, waterfalls, clouds and torn skies. While his subject matter has remained relatively consistent over the years, he has revisited each theme using different media, aiding him in finding unique ways in which he continues to work. Most of the artist's paintings are colorfield, such as Untitled (Ocean Blue #12), from 1988, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Other paintings superimpose mundane objects on top of the color field.
Over the past fifty years, Goode's work has been shown in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is included in many major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Menil Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Goode lives and works in Los Angeles, California.