“I’ve been all over this world four times”: Travel, Place, and Memory in the Drawings of Joseph E. Yoakum

Abstract

This dissertation examines the landscape drawings of Joseph E. Yoakum (1891-1972) through the concept of place. Born in the Missouri Ozarks, Yoakum traveled widely in the US and abroad before settling in Chicago. In 1962, when he was in his early seventies, Yoakum began drawing in response to a dream. Over the next decade, Yoakum produced approximately 2,000 drawings using blue and black ballpoint pens, felt-tip pens, graphite pencils, colored pencils, pastels, and watercolors. His early travels informed the subject of these drawings, which primarily consist of abstracted landscapes hand-inscribed with the location pictured. My dissertation foregrounds the concept of place in four interconnected chapters. Chapter One investigates Yoakum’s “place” in relevant scholarship, tracing the artist’s history within the field of outsider art and beyond. Chapter Two explores the relationship of place as subject matter to Yoakum’s artistic process and identifies possible source materials and inspirations for his drawings based on the reading materials he kept in his studio. Chapter Three uses the concepts of “sense of place,” “place attachment,” and “placelessness” to elucidate new patterns and connections between drawings when they are grouped by location. Chapter Four proposes a treatment of the drawing inscriptions as Yoakum’s written record and connects them to the traditions of travel writing and autobiography. By reading Yoakum’s works through concepts of place, this project contributes new understandings of his drawings, artistic process, subject matter, and writing.