The rhythmic and luminous landscapes of Joseph E. Yoakum express a collision of the real and the imagined. For many years after the artist became publicly recognized, it was assumed that the locales that he depicted in a schematic, fluid manner were fictional, even though he claimed to have traveled to each site, including Mt. Magazine, Arkansas’s highest point. As the advance man for an itinerant circus and part of an elite team of African American troops in Europe during World War I, Yoakum had a nomadic lifestyle that entailed extensive travel—a motion and energy that infuse his art. Scholars have now allowed for the possibility that the vistas are recorded memories based in truth, although they may be embellished by the artist’s creative filter and his observation of topographical maps in atlases that were found in his studio. He likely started drawing in 1962, when he was in his seventies, and thereafter he made one or two drawings a day until his death. Chicago imagists, who collected and exhibited his works, championed him.

Valérie Rousseau, exhibition label for Six Decades Collecting Self-Taught Art: Revealing a Diverse and Rich Artistic Narrative. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2019.