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Though under-known and underappreciated, Yoakums time may finally have come.
By the time he died on Christmas Day ten years later, he had produced around 2,000 radiant drawings.
All glimmering with prismatic secondary colors.
There are repeating curves and forest patterns, rising and falling hills.
Notice that things are depicted from all directions at once from above, below, left, and right.
Yoakum wasnt looking for the end of the world.
He uses the same cows, chickens, and horses repeatedly.
Yoakum was no outlier in any of this.
Yoakums tangled arrangements also conjure the ecstatic confusions of William Blake.
Not to mention railroad and circus posters.
Yoakum has loomed large in my imagination since 1971, when I was 20 years old.
I knew Id encountered a life force and glimpsed a kind of aesthetic possibleness.
Suddenly, Chicago was artistic Mecca.
As a Chicagoan, these sorts of miracles seemed common.
Our grudging Second City mentally made us develop our own regional preferences and tastes.
Beguiled, he went in, bought a few for less than $10.
Very soon, Hopgood got him a show in the small foyer at the nearby St. Bartholomew Church.
And began spreading the word.
In turn, they all began to buy and talk about and arrange shows for Yoakum.
But this was the early 1970s.
Outsider artists stayed outside.
Then post-minimalism and 100 other styles mushroomed in New York and around the world.
And the art world suffered for excluding so many of these people for so long.
Love will find a way.
Joseph Elmer Yoakum atVenus Over Manhattanthrough July 26.
