The Visionary Landscapes Of Joseph Yoakum: ‘There’s Nothing I Haven’t Suffered To See Things First Hand’

Joseph Yoakum (1890-1972) often jotted the locations of his abstracted landscape drawings in the top left of the pictures—the Florida Everglades, the Mississippi River, Utah canyons, New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain, Oregon’s Columbia River, a Minnesota waterfall, Alaska, Argentina, Cuba, mountains outside Madrid, the English Channel, the Himalayas, New Zealand mountains. The Chicago artist claimed to have visited every one.

“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,” he told Chicago artist Christine Ramberg in 1969.

Yoakum told people that he was born in 1886, or 1888, “near the village of Window Rock, Arizona, in the Southwest territory before it were made the Navajo and Apache Indian reservation,” according to Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York, where more than 60 of Yoakum’s drawings were on view from June 20 to July 26, 2019.

But his Social Security and army records report that he was born in southwestern Missouri on Feb. 20, 1890, as Derrel B. DePasse noted in her 2001 book “Traveling the Rainbow: The Life and Art of Joseph E. Yoakum.” His father, John Yokum, was born in the Cherokee nation in 1850. His mother, Frances “Frannie” Wadlow, was of French-American, Cherokee and African-American descent and born enslaved on a farm in Green County, Missouri, in 1857.

Yoakum said he left home when still young to join the Great Wallace Circus. He told of touring the country, putting up advertising posters for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and working for the Ringling Brothers circus, including serving as personal valet to John Ringling. Before he returned to Missouri around 1908, and began having children with his girlfriend (later his wife) Myrtle Julian the following year, he claimed to have visited every continent—save Antarctica—“as a hobo and stowaway.”

The Chicago art historian Whitney Halstead, a friend of Yoakum’s, had doubts, calling Yoakum’s accounts “more invention than reality… in part myth, Yoakum’s life as he would have wished to have lived it.” But DePasse reported that Yoakum had actually visited many of the places that he said he had, that many of his stories were true.

Yoakum seems to have served in France with the 805th Pioneer Infantry of the United States Army during World War I. But after the war, he didn’t return to his family. Instead, he ended up in Chicago. Venus Over Manhattan says Yoakum worked as a mechanic, carpenter and railroad inspector. In the early 1940s, he and a second wife ran an ice cream shop on Chicago’s South Side. In 1946, according to some reports, Yoakum was committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Somewhere around 1962, at the age of 72, in Chicago, Yoakum began making landscape drawings outlined in ballpoint pen (two lines around land masses) of forests, mountains, rivers and roads, drawings inspired by his travels. They are distinguished by shapes that wind about like curtains or intestines. He colored them in with pastels, watercolors, and crayons, and buffed them with toilet paper. By then he was retired, his wife had died, and he’d found a home in Chicago housing project for the elderly.

Yoakum referenced travel books, an atlas, the Encyclopedia Britannica, but his drawings often do not resemble the places they’re said to depict—which sewed doubt about his stories. Mostly he drew landscapes, though he occasionally rendered places and scenes from the lives of Moses and Jesus, as well as portraits of Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Clark Gable, boxer Jack Johnson, steel driver John Henry. Yoakum dated them with a rubber stamp to add a “touch of class.”

“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.

In 1966, Yoakum moved into a South Side storefront on 82nd Street near Stony Island Avenue. In the second half of the 1960s, he often produced a drawing or more a day. “I had to do something, or I’d go crazy,” he said.

A neighbor, John Hopgood, saw some drawings Yoakum had clothes-pinned to a line in his window around 1967. An anthropologist and professor at Chicago State College, Hopgood helped Yoakum get an exhibition at The Whole, a coffeehouse in the basement of St. Bartholomew’s Lutheran Church on the city’s South Side.

“He was a large man, with huge hands. He was shy, quiet, proud of his drawings. He felt flattered that anyone would want to show them. He carried a portfolio with maybe a hundred pictures. I chose twenty or thirty which we later matted,” Harvey Pranian, the director there, told Diane Allison for a 1995 article in Raw Vision magazine.

Norman Mark of the Chicago Daily News interviewed Yoakum in 1967, around the time of the coffeehouse show. “Why can’t people realize that we’re all God-made and sustained and become more considerable toward each other and make this world a decent place to live in again,” the artist told him.

Tom Brand, owner of Galaxy Press on the south side of Chicago, saw Yoakum’s art at The Whole and got Ed Sherbyn Gallery on Clark Street, on the north side of the city, to exhibit them in spring 1968. There artists from Chicago’s Hairy Who pop art collective discovered Yoakum’s art. Painter Karl Wirsum bought a drawing and took it home, where painter Jim Nutt saw it, and went and bought some himself. Word spread through their circles of artists and teachers and historians—including Whitney Halstead, who would befriend Yoakum, including helping him to the doctor late in life. Chicago artist Roger Brown recalled that finding Yoakum’s art in Chicago “was like finding [Henri] Rousseau in our own backyard.”

Illness landed Yoakum in a nursing home in 1971. He died a month before a solo exhibition of his work opened at New York’s Whitney Museum in 1972.

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