Presented here is a group of major works by Joseph Elmer Yoakum, the visionary autodidact landscape painter, who was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, curated by Marcia Tucker, which cemented his position as one of the 20th century’s most innovative talents. An artist of African-American and Native American descent, Yoakum made drawings that describe the movements and panoramas of a life spent traveling – with the circus as a young man, in the army during the First World War, and alone hopping train cars in the American West – all before settling in Chicago, where he began making work in 1962, at the age of 72..

Joseph Elmer Yoakum's (born 1890 in Ash Grove, Missouri) work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including exhibitions at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of the University of Chicago; Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is held many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Menil Collection, Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Yoakum lived and worked in Chicago until his death in 1972.