Joseph Yoakum - Artistic Work

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 these drawings. Concurrently, he had an account with Ed Sherbyn Gallery on the north side of Chicago. Brand persuaded Sherbyn to exhibit the works of Yoakum and he went further and printed a 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, through his excitement about Yoakum, informed fellow 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, was 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." (Depasse 2001, p. 3)

In 1967, Yoakum was discovered by the mainstream art community by 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 Nillson, 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. Eventually 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.

The end of his life was marked by a use of pure abstraction, during the final 4 months, as in his illustration Flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo on July 4, 1914 in that drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving their homes for safety. That painting was one of his autobiographical works.