There’s not a lot of documented information about Joseph Yoakum. He channeled his history,
his memories, his experiences into the artwork he was making.
As a child he traveled with circuses.
He ran away from home at a pretty young age and began working with a number of circuses
that crisscrossed the US by train.
And so a lot of his experiences of travel, of engagement with the
landscape, come from this moment in his life where he really
saw so many things that weren’t available to—certainly people his age, people of his race, at the time.
He had really a broad experience of both the United States and also internationally.
In the early 20th century, he was actually drafted into World War I, which kind of further
gave him the opportunity to travel, to see different countries, really have a broader
experience of the world. And all of that feeds into what ultimately becomes the world he
wants to depict and celebrate and capture in his artwork.
He began making art in the early 1960s. They’re landscapes
that unfold to us in kind of mysterious, but very beautiful, ways. You have rising mountains,
flowing rivers and water sometimes that seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere,
lots of foliage, bands of trees that take us into the distance. Very rarely you’ll get a little
house or some kind of sign of human intervention, but generally these are untouched, beautiful
landscapes where the sun is always shining and everything is always in bloom. It’s
really very idyllic, kind of Garden of Eden–type landscapes with these amazing geological,
geographical forms within them.
Because he was a man of color living in Chicago, which
is often thought to be one of the most segregated cities in the US, he wasn’t really discovered
as an artist until the late ’60s. He lived in a storefront apartment at the time, so
there was a big glass window that allowed him to kind of display his work for passersby,
and a professor sees the work and a couple of weeks later Yoakum has an exhibition at
a coffee house in the basement of a college. Word spreads about his work pretty quickly
through this group of artists who come to know him. His work has a huge influence on
a whole generation of artists who know him and who go on to have very successful careers
themselves. And this is all when Yoakum is in his late seventies, where these artists
who he’s working with are several generations younger. It gives them permission, somehow,
not only to do what they want, but to ignore what’s going on in the art world and proceed
as they see fit, because that’s certainly what Yoakum did. Yoakum didn’t care what
was on the cover of Artforum. He had his vision, he had his path, and he followed it.
I think what I love most about Yoakum’s work is the insane level of detail. Like why draw
one line when you can draw 15 lines in order to add texture and shape to a mountain cliff?
Why draw one tree when you can draw a band of like 35 trees to help lead you into the
background of the space? Even if you only pick one in the whole show, if you spend time
trying to figure out what exactly is going on, it’s incredibly meaningful.
It can be, I think, a really spiritual experience in that way, that sense of someone trying to
show you what they think the world is at its best, and allowing yourself to follow them there.