Joseph Yoakum Art

Joseph Yoakum Andes Mountains Peru So America, circa 1960s Colored pencil and ballpoint pen on paper 7 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches Provenance: Karen Lennox Gallery, Chicago Private Collection, South Dakota Yoakum began drawing in the early 1960s. Most of his work consists of radiantly colored landscapes with mountains, water, trees, and winding roads in abstract and complex configurations. his period of greatest activity — 1965 to 1970 — when he usually made one drawing a day. Yoakum maintained he had seen all the places represented in his drawings, a statement that may not be true in some instances. He traveled a great deal, beginning in his early teens when he ran away from home and became a circus handyman. Yoakum’s drawings can be considered memory images growing out of either actual or imagined experiences. All of his drawings have titles that grew longer and more specific over the years. He dated his works with a rubber stamp — an oddly impersonal, labor-saving device. Although Joseph Yoakum gave vastly different accounts of his background, he was, throughout his life, classified as an African American. Sometimes Yoakum claimed that he was a full-blooded ​“Nava-joe” Indian, one of twelve or thirteen children born to a farmer on an Indian reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. At other times he insisted that he was of African-American descent. He described his mother as a strong woman who was a doctor and knowledgeable in the use of herbal medicines. Yoakum’s family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, during his early childhood. His father was employed briefly in the railroad yards prior to settling permanently on a farm in nearby Walnut Grove...