Joseph Yoakum

c.1890-1972 · Chicago, USA

In a Chicago storefront, an old man who said he had toured the world with circuses drew a landscape nearly every day, mountains folding like cloth around places he may or may not have seen. It did not matter. The drawings were true.

The life

Yoakum’s early life is half legend, much of it his own telling: circus advance man, stowaway, wanderer across every continent. Of African American descent while claiming Navajo heritage, he settled in Chicago and, around 1962, began drawing what he called spiritual unfoldment, dating each sheet. The young Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson among them, bought everything they could afford and spread the word. He died in 1972, weeks after the Art Institute showed his work; in 2021 MoMA and the Art Institute mounted a full retrospective.

The work

Around two thousand landscapes in ballpoint, pastel and watercolour: ridgelines like folded fabric, paired suns, roads that slip between hills like veins. Geography processed through memory, myth and serene invention.

Why we love them

He drew the world as a story he was owed. Documentation is for passports; this is travel of a higher order.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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