“Wherever my mind led me, I would go.”
Joseph Elmer Yoakum was an American self-taught painter. He was of African-American and possibly of Native American–descent, and was known for his landscape paintings in the outsider art-style.
He was seventy-six (76) – dates vary, but going with that – when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes and produced over 2,000 drawings during the last decade of his life.
I was only seventy-five (75) – date certain – when I discovered for myself Joseph E. Yoakum.
And my style was already primitive. Not an outsider, more a misfit.
A curious thing happens when an “outsider’s” artistic vision penetrates the carapace of anonymity to reach the appreciating public in the artist’s old age. In those final, brief moments of recognition, their previously isolated and largely unrecorded lives become an infinitely fetishized object. We, the audience, look back to their pre-artmaking periods through the optics of their eventual production, against the grain of time. We investigate, authenticate, and exaggerate, furbishing the particularly ravishing facets like cutting gems, looking for a particular shape of reality for whom the art can seem both a logical extension and a pre-historical motive.
The Long and Nomadic Life of a Mythmaking Artist
Early life
Joseph Elmer Yoakum’s biographical information is difficult to verify but he also claimed to be of African, French, and Cherokee descent. New York Times critic Will Heinrich called his biography “tricky…It’s poorly documented, and the artist himself was not a reliable narrator.” His birthdates have also been given as 1886, 1888, and 1891, and his Veteran’s Administration record says he was born in Springfield, Missouri.
A 9-year-old Joe Yoakum does show up in the 1900 U.S. census in Greene County, Missouri, listed as Black, with his father’s birthplace being listed as Indian Territory. His father, John Yoakum ,is listed in the 1880 census as Black, with his birthplace listed as Cherokee Nation.
Yoakum was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, but told a story of being born in Arizona, in 1888, as a Navajo Indian on the Window Rock Navajo reservation. Taking pride in his exaggerated Native heritage, Yoakum would pronounce “Navajo” as “Na-va-JOE” (as in “Joseph”). He spent his early childhood on a Missouri farm.
Yoakum left home when he was nine-years-old to join the Great Wallace Circus. As a bill poster, he also traveled across the U.S. with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Ringling Brothers, among five different circuses. He later traveled to Europe as a stowaway.
In 1908, he returned to Missouri and started a family with his girlfriend Myrtle Julian, with whom he had his first son in 1909; the couple married in 1910. Around 1916, he worked in a coal mine, Hale Coal and Mining to support his family. Yoakum was drafted into the United States Army in 1918 and worked in the 805th Pioneer Infantry, repairing roads and railroads.
After the war, he traveled around the United States, working odd jobs, but never returned to his family. He later remarried and moved to Chicago.
In 1946, Yoakum was committed to a psychiatric hospital there.
He soon left and by the early 1950s he was drawing on a regular basis.
Artistic work
Yoakum was again living and painting in Chicago by 1962. Tom Brand, owner of Galaxy Press on the south side of Chicago, in 1968 had some printing to deliver to a coffee shop called “The Whole”. While there he noticed the colored pencil drawings of Yoakum and was immediately taken by them. Brand had an account with the Ed Sherbyn Gallery on the north side of Chicago, and he persuaded Sherbyn to exhibit Yoakum’s works and even printed his own poster for this show. Norman Mark of The Chicago Daily News wrote an article about Yoakum called “My drawings are a spiritual unfoldment”; this article was printed on the back of the poster.
Brand informed his artist friends (including Whitney Halstead) about Yoakum and encouraged them to visit “The Whole” coffee shop. Halstead, an artist and instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became the greatest promoter of Yoakum’s work during his lifetime. He believed that his story was “more invention than reality… in part myth, Yoakum’s life as he would have wished to have lived it.”
In 1967, Yoakum was discovered by the mainstream art community through John Hopgood, an instructor at the Chicago State College, who saw Yoakum’s work hanging in his studio window and purchased twenty-two pictures. A group of students including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi, and teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, took an interest in promoting his work. In 1972, just one month before his death, Yoakum was given a one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
He started drawing familiar places, such as Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, as a method to capture his memories. However, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes in places he had never visited, like Mt Cloubelle of West India or Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia. Drawing outlines with ballpoint pen, rarely making corrections, he colored his drawings within the lines using watercolors and pastels. He became known for his organic forms, always using two lines to designate land masses.
During the final four months of his life Yoakum’s work was marked by a use of pure abstraction, as in his illustration Flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo [Missouri] on July 4, 1914 in that [waters] drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving [sic] their homes for safety. That painting was one of his autobiographical works.
In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art presented more than 100 of his works in an exhibition called Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw. It was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Drawing Institute, which is part of the Menil Collection
Source: Wikipedia
The Otherworldly Art of Joseph E. Yoakum
At MOMA, an outsider artist is now in.
By Andrea K. Scott January 28, 2022 for The New Yorker
Categories in art can be confounding. The term “Impressionist” was coined by a Parisian critic to make a laughingstock of Claude Monet. Donald Judd, who is considered the consummate Minimalist, always rejected the label. The thorniest designation of all may be that of “outsider artist.” Just as the word “primitive” was once dismissively used to yoke together artistic geniuses who were not European, the category of outsider has an inherently lower-rung ring to it.
It also has a few loopholes. The Belgian trickster Marcel Broodthaers did not attend art school and lived in poverty until the age of forty, when he began to make art using scavenged mussel shells (among other materials); now, far from being pigeonholed as a self-taught artist, he is vaunted as one of the twentieth century’s greatest Conceptualists. Several major exhibitions in recent years—including “The Encyclopedic Palace,” at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and “Outliers and American Vanguard Art,” at the National Gallery, in 2018—have succeeded in eroding outmoded distinctions by presenting insiders and outsiders as artists of equal merit.
moma, like most long-standing art institutions, has had a complicated relationship to canonical hierarchies: in the mid-eighties, a blockbuster Modernist exhibition, which treated African, Oceanic, and American tribal art as little more than source material, stirred a controversy about colonialist curatorial attitudes that persists today in worldwide calls for museums to repatriate objects. But the museum has also been showing and collecting art by self-taught mavericks since the nineteen-thirties. In the spring of 1971, an eclectic group show at moma (on view in a members-only penthouse) introduced visitors to the radiant, otherworldly landscape drawings of Joseph E. Yoakum, an eighty-year-old Black Army veteran from Chicago, who had been making art for less than a decade.
Yoakum’s world is populated by countless trees, but tends to be untroubled by people—until you register that some of the rippling mountains and rocks are sneakily anthropomorphic. Their craggy surfaces open into elliptical caves whose placement can suggest an eye or a mouth, lined with copses rather than teeth. By the time that Yoakum’s landscapes were hanging at moma, his uncanny world had already captivated a close-knit group of recent art-school grads, figurative painters, some of whom called themselves the Hairy Who. (Now that’s a label.) One of them was so taken with Yoakum’s distinctive vocabulary of marks—dashes, close parallel lines—that he made a chart of them.
Yoakum died the year after moma’s show, at the age of eighty-one, but his drawings have returned to the museum in “What I Saw,” a riveting retrospective of a hundred or so indelible works on paper (on view through March 19th). What inspired Yoakum to put colored pencil and ballpoint pen to paper at the age of seventy-one? He said that his instructions arrived in a dream, and he described his drawings as “spiritual unfoldments.” What they unfold are the places he visited, both in his peripatetic younger days and in his imagination.
The show’s excellent catalogue includes a carefully researched chronology, confirming some biographical details of an artist with a fabulist’s gift for embellishment. Born in Missouri, in 1891, to a formerly enslaved mother and a father with probable Cherokee heritage, Yoakum, during his art-making years, identified himself as Navajo. He ran away from home at the age of nine to join the first of four travelling circuses, as well as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. By the time he turned eighteen, he was back home, working as a fireman, and starting a family. In 1918, he enlisted in the Army and, after basic training in Kansas, sailed from Canada to France to join the First World War, with an all-Black regiment which repaired railroads; two months into his tour of duty he was court-martialed for insolence (the racist implications are unmistakable). When the war ended, he left his wife and five children (he remarried around 1930) and worked a variety of jobs, from a factory worker in Iowa to a salesman in Florida, before settling down in Chicago, where he lived for twenty years, until he had his art-history-altering dream.
Trains and ships are frequent motifs in Yoakum’s drawings; as for the flying saucers that hover in his landscapes from time to time, the artist explained those with an anecdote about his only flight on an airplane, which, he said, was required to make an emergency landing in Arizona after being “buzzed” by aliens. (Somewhere a sleuthing art historian is even now likely consulting declassified government records.)
As the artist told a reporter in Chicago, shortly before his death, “Wherever my mind led me, I would go.”
In his final years, an artist born in the Jim Crow era chose absolute freedom.
“My drawings are a spiritual unfoldment,” he told Norman Mark of The Chicago Daily News in 1967. Yoakum said he took up art after sickness awoke him one night and he felt obliged to draw—first sketching Golgotha, in Christianity the site of Jesus’s crucifixion. He would produce a couple thousand artworks before his death. “The Bible is my biggest storybook,” Yoakum said. “What I don’t get, God didn’t intend me to have, and what I get is God’s blessing,” Yoakum said.
