Joseph E. Yoakum

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

What I Saw

Edited by Mark Pascale, Esther Adler, and Edouard Kopp; With contributions by Esther Adler, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Mary Broadway, Clara Granzotto, Whitney Halstead, Edouard Kopp, Faheem Majeed, Laura K. Minton, Emily Olek, Mark Pascale, and Ken Sutherland

View Inside Format: HC - Paper over Board
Price: $50.00
YUP
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings

Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum’s story comes from the artist himself—and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891–1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a “spiritual unfoldment”? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities. With hundreds of beautiful color reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.



Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago


Exhibition Schedule:

The Art Institute of Chicago
(June 12–October 18, 2021)

Museum of Modern Art, New York
(November 28, 2021–March 18, 2022)

Menil Collection, Houston
(April 22–August 7, 2022)

 

Mark Pascale is Janet and Craig Duchossois Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Esther Adler is associate curator for the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Édouard Kopp is John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator for the Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection, Houston.



 

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

The Art Institute of Chicago
(June 12–October 18, 2021)

Museum of Modern Art, New York
(November 28, 2021–March 18, 2022)

Menil Collection, Houston
(April 22–August 7, 2022)

 

“[Yoakum’s ] undulating forms and vigorous patterning offer a delirious take on the notion of the sublime in nature. . . . [An] elegant monograph.”—Anne Doran,ARTnews(“Best Art Books of 2021”)
ISBN: 9780300257489
Publication Date: July 27, 2021
Publishing Partner: Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago
252 pages, 9 x 12
200 color illus.
Martin Puryear

Multiple Dimensions

Mark Pascale; With an essay by Ruth Fine

View details
Hairy Who? 1966–1969

Edited by Thea Liberty Nichols, Mark Pascale, and Ann Golds

...
View details
Drawing Is Everything

Founding Gifts of the Menil Drawing Institute

Edouard Kopp, John Elderfield, Richard Shiff, and Terry Win

...
View details
French Drawings from the Age of Claude, Poussin, Watteau, and Fragonard

Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums

Alvin L.

View details
Robert Motherwell Drawing

As Fast as the Mind Itself

Edouard Kopp

View details
Dare to Know

Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment

Edited by Edouard Kopp, Elizabeth M.

...
View details