Joseph Elmer Yoakum was an American self-educated artist and painter. A representative of Outsider Art, he became famous for his brightly colored abstract landscapes he created using the line as the main form.
Background
Ethnicity:
Joseph Yoakum’s father was of Cherokee and African-American origin and his mother was French-American.
Joseph Elmer Yoakum was born about 22 February 1890, in Ash Grove, Missouri, United States. The artist himself often stated the village of Window Rock, Arizona as his birthplace and added that he was of Navajo Indian ancestry.
Yoakum was one of ten children in a family.
Education
Born into a huge and modest family, Joseph Yoakum had a lack of formal education. He stated that he studied only three or four months.
Yoakum was raised till the age of nine on a Missouri farm.
Career
The start of Joseph Yoakum professional life can be counted from the age of nine when he left his home in Missouri and joined the Great Wallace Circus. He traveled across the United States with its Wild West Show as a billposter and horse tender. Then, he also toured in the same capacities with five other troupes, including Buffalo Bill Cody and Ringling Brothers.
Yoakum came back to Missouri in 1908. After the marriage with his girlfriend, he moved to Fort Scott, Kansas where he worked in coal mining to make provision for his family.
During the First World War, in 1918, Joseph Yoakum was enlisted to the army where he served in the 805th Pioneer Infantry as a repairer of roads, railroads, and bridges.
After the end of the war conflict, Yoakum decided not to return to the family he left in Fort Scott. Instead, he recommenced his nomade lifestyle traveling across the country and earning his living by different odd jobs like railroad porter, seaman, apple picker, and rock quarries. By the late 1920s, he settled down in Chicago where he formed a new family.
He started to draw in a couple of decades. His early images depicted familiar areas where he had been before. Later, Yoakum shifted to more abstract pieces featuring the imaginary places, like Mt. Cloubelle of West India or Mt. Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane, Australia. Perhaps, the artist took inspiration from his own rich collection of illustrated books and encyclopedias on geography.
The pictures of Joseph Yoakum remained unseen by the audience till 1967 when they were noticed by Tom Brand who owned a Galaxy Press in Chicago. He was so impressed by the drawings that he organized a kind of exhibition from them at the Ed Sherbyn Gallery. The presentation was even accompanied by the artist’s poster and an article in The Chicago Daily News. Whitney Halstead, an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who was among the visitors of the show became one of the avid supporters of Yoakum’s art.
Along with a group of artists from the institution known as the Imagists and another art educator from the Chicago State College (currently Chicago State University), John Hopgood, Yoakum’s drawings were introduced to the wide mainstream art community. In 1969, his works were featured on their group exhibition at the Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Three years later, a month before his death, Yoakum had the first and the last solo show while alive at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
Great Dividing Range of Queensland sector near Brisbane, Australia,
Fergus Falls Minnesota
King Leopold Range, Argyle Downs, Australia
Mt. Gebel Ataoa near Suez, Egypt
Altai Mtns. Mongolia Asia
Fertil Mounds Near Wyanoka, Oklahoma
Lake of the Ozarks
Moosehead Lake Near Town of Rockwood in North Central Maine
Clark Gable Sr. Movie Actor Hollywood California
Mt. Whitney Sierr Nevada Cal
Pine Mountain Near Middlesboro Kentuckey
The Everglades in So. Florida near town Redland
Coachello Valley Near San Bernardino California, August 4
Mt. McKinley in Rocky Mountain Range on Pacific Ocean near Fairbanks, Alaska
CS Valentin Crater
Cedar Valley Range, Utah
Deming, New Mexico at Foot of Florida Mtn Range near town of Deming
Mt. Elizabeth in Serpentine Mnt Range in towns Ste Quentin New Brunswick
Argyle Canyon, Utah
St. Louis & San Francisco Rail Road
Chieff Gray Eagle Squaw wife Ogalla of Jicarilla Tribe Reservation of Concord Newhampshire
Mound Valley
Mt Look Out in Toppenish Range near Vancouver Washinton
Trinity Brazus
West Coast Range, Aberta Canada
Religion
Joseph Yoakum was a strong religious man who believed both in Christianity and Navajo animism. He also put his faith in the fact that God and nature were the same things.
Views
Quotations:
"I tell you – there's few places I haven't been – of any size that is. And there's nothing I haven't suffered to see things first hand."
Personality
As Joseph Yoakum stated he began to draw as the result of a dream he had about 1962. He called the drawing process “spiritual enfoldment”.
He usually provided all of his drawings with the name of the depicted location and the date when he visited it. Some inscriptions contain autobiographical notices.
Although many of those who knew Yoakum believed that he invented the stories about his trips, the first biographer of the artist, Derrel B. DePasse, found that he visited almost all the places he featured on his drawings.
Physical Characteristics:
After Joseph Yoakum was diagnosed with ‘chronic brain syndrome’ in 1946 currently known as dementia, he spent a year in a psychiatric ward.
Connections
Joseph Yoakum married his girlfriend Myrtle Julian in 1910. The family produced five children.
Yoakum never came back to the family after he left it in 1918 to join the army during the First World War.