Joe Barrett was shaped by classical training, postwar Los Angeles, and the convergence of high art with underground culture. Born to Jewish immigrant parents and raised in East LA's City Terrace barrio, he passed for Chicano and became involved with a local pachuco gang. At fifteen, facing trouble with the law, he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy, serving aboard the USS Allen in the Pacific during World War II.

After his discharge in 1946, Joe studied under Rico Lebrun at the Jepson Art Institute on the GI Bill. During his time there, he rented a room at the Sowden House in Los Feliz, where he was drawn into the Black Dahlia investigation. After the suspect fled the country, Joe moved into the former Adolphus Busch mansion on Pasadena's Millionaire Row, shared with other Jepson students as an artist community, where he befriended neighbor Jack Parsons, the rocket engineer and occultist. Joe worked as a technical illustrator at North American Aviation while pursuing his painting. In the late 1950s, he traveled to Boston for a friend's wedding and decided to stay, immersing himself in the city's jazz, poetry, and beat scene before returning to LA in the early 1960s.

Upon his return, Joe discovered his father had burned all his stored paintings and drawings. The loss was devastating, but Joe continued working for decades, developing a style entirely his own. He taught at Brooks Institute and later Santa Barbara Art Institute after migrating with other faculty, then devoted himself fully to his craft. Working primarily from the 1960s through 2000s, he created hundreds of paintings and drawings that remained largely unseen during his lifetime and are only now being made available to collectors and institutions.