{"id":1148,"date":"2021-08-10T00:02:42","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T16:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2021-08-08T23:52:39","modified_gmt":"2021-08-08T15:52:39","slug":"the-world-on-a-single-plane-joseph-e-yoakum-at-the-art-institute-of-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/the-world-on-a-single-plane-joseph-e-yoakum-at-the-art-institute-of-chicago\/","title":{"rendered":"THE WORLD ON A SINGLE PLANE: JOSEPH E. YOAKUM AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph E. Yoakum\u2019s origin story has long been inseparable from the reception of his artwork. In 1962, when he was a 71-year-old retiree living in a storefront apartment on Chicago\u2019s South Side, Yoakum had a dream in which he was urged to make art. He drew nearly every day for the remaining ten years of his life, using inexpensive paper, ballpoint pens, pastels, colored pencils, and sometimes watercolors to create more than two thousand pieces that constitute an atlas of his psychic geography. Among his best-known works are undulant landscapes that are almost psychedelic in their vertiginous perspectives. \u201cWhat I Saw,\u201d on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, gathers nearly one hundred of these works, plus portraits, sketchbooks, and ephemera\u2014a small but revelatory fraction of Yoakum\u2019s singular output.<\/p>\n

Jim Nutt<\/a>, a fellow Chicago artist, and one of many influenced by his predecessor\u2019s enigmatic oeuvre, once categorized Yoakum\u2019s work as \u201cexciting to ponder [but] difficult to describe.\u201d That difficulty is two-pronged. The first issue is Yoakum\u2019s disorienting style. His landscapes (named after real places, sometimes misspelled) typically occupy one visual plane, in which mountains, a ribbon of empty highway, and stands of conifers might coexist in woozy harmony. Cliffs drift and sway, more flamelike than earthlike, even as their striations draw attention to geologic time. In the undated\u00a0Mt Colbart of Nome Alaska,\u00a0<\/em>for example, the mountains resemble veiny ziggurats with apertures in which improbable layers of alpine forests jostle. In\u00a0Weeping Pebble of Sirrea\u00a0<\/em>Range in Virginia Park Nevada<\/em>\u00a0(1967), a prairie dog or other desert creature is almost as tall as a nearby cactus; a flower is as big as a tree. In Yoakum\u2019s world, scale is more poetic than spatial.<\/p>\n

The second difficulty is the mismatch between a work\u2019s title and what it represents. As a runaway teen, Yoakum worked for traveling circuses, and he said he\u2019d set foot on every continent except Antarctica. His landscapes are a fabulist\u2019s enjambments in which memory meets invention.\u00a0Arabian Desert Near Sudi<\/em>\u00a0<\/b>Arabia\u00a0<\/em><\/a>(1964) includes verdant pockets of trees and weeds not native to that region.\u00a0Ground Floor of Grand Canyon Colorado River Near Arizona State Line,\u00a0<\/em>from the same year, features two houses and a derrick nestled inside a womb-like cavity in the canyon\u2019s rock wall, an unreal scene that merges domesticity with craggy wilderness. Yoakum\u2019s unpeopled geography isn\u2019t severe, though. Its dynamism is the result of his fluid line, the hashmarks and shadings that deepen the animated quality of his compositions, and the subtle vibrancy of his palette, which, from afar, can lead the drawings to be mistaken for watercolors.<\/p>\n

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\"An<\/div>\n<\/div>
Joseph E. Yoakum,\u00a0Beulah Dudley 1st Negro Woman to Win Golff Record in Year 1927<\/em>, stamped 1970, felt-tip pen, ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 11 \u00be by 9 in.<\/span>COURTESY THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, BEQUEST OF WHITNEY HALSTEAD.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Yet, for all their wonders, Yoakum\u2019s landscapes are best appreciated in moderation. A roomful can start to feel repetitive, dulling the idiosyncrasies of individual works. \u201cWhat I Saw\u201d offers relief in the form of Yoakum\u2019s portraits and figurative drawings. These pieces, mostly busts, also complicate Yoakum\u2019s fraught relationship with race. His father claimed Cherokee blood while his mother was a Black woman born into slavery. Yoakum often portrayed himself as Navajo (or \u201cNava-joe,\u201d his portmanteau), largely because he feared being exploited as a Black artist, even as he drew admiring portraits of Black luminaries such as Nat King Cole. In\u00a0Ella Fitzgerald Moovie\u00a0<\/em><\/a>Star\u00a0<\/em>(1966), Yoakum based his depiction of the jazz singer on a white model from an illustrated Breck shampoo ad. Maybe the source material was easier for Yoakum to trace than a photograph of Fitzgerald. Or maybe he was offering his own subliminal commentary on race, as could be the case in his 1969 drawing of the Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose figure is dwarfed by the totemic profile of the white challenger Jess Willard, who beat Johnson to become the world heavyweight champion in 1915.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I Saw<\/a>\u201d is an invigorating exhibition of an American original. Yoakum\u2019s art, which he called a \u201cspiritual unfoldment,\u201d has exemplified the visionary tradition; this show recenters his formal and stylistic ingenuity. While some artists share aspects of his style\u2014Georgia O\u2019Keeffe could finesse landscape into supple abstraction, Marguerite Zorach aspired to a single visual plane, and a number of folk or \u201coutsider\u201d artists toy with relative scale\u2014few so energetically mediate imagination and place, and with such conviction. A Chicago professor once told Yoakum that he\u2019d never seen mountains in Iowa that looked like those the artist drew. Yoakum replied, \u201cWell, that was because you never looked.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph E. Yoakum\u2019s origin story has long been inseparable from the reception of his artwork. In 1962, when he was a 71-year-old retiree living in a storefront apartment on Chicago\u2019s South Side, Yoakum had a dream in which he was urged to make art. He drew nearly every day for the remaining ten years of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nTHE WORLD ON A SINGLE PLANE: JOSEPH E. YOAKUM AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Joseph E. 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