Sculptor, painter, printmaker, and illustrator, James Joseph Kearns was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 7 August 1924. Kearns served in the U.S. Army during World War II from 1943 to 1946, after which time he enrolled at DePaul University, the University of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his Bachelors in Fine Arts degree in 1950. Following graduation Kearns worked in a factory to support his family while also pursuing fine art as a career. In 1956 he held his first solo exhibition at the Grippi Gallery in New York.

Kearns was a professor of drawing, painting and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan between 1960 and 1990, and he was awarded the Distinguished Artist-Teacher Award in 1990. He also taught at the Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Manhattan.
His works has been exhibited at the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2006, the Rider University Art Gallery, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, mounted a retrospective of his drawings and paintings.

Kearns’ work is included in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC.; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

Kearns currently resides in New Jersey.