Workbook A

Joseph Elmer Yoakum (American, b. 1891) started drawing in his seventies, creating inventive landscapes between the early 1960s and his death in 1972. In 1972 the artist completed his final pieces—a group of five workbooks with some 140 drawings between them—while living in a convalescent home. The works depict locations from across the world and feature detailed titles, and a few border on abstraction. Made with ballpoint pen, chalk, colored pencil, crayon, fiber-tipped pen, graphite pencil, and pastel, the drawings resonate with his earlier oeuvre while reflecting some novel approaches. Today the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection houses four of these workbooks, alongside hundreds of single sheets, making it the largest repository of Yoakum’s oeuvre. Many of the drawings were gifts from Whitney Halstead, an art historian, artist, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a dedicated collector and chronicler of Yoakum’s work. Photographed and presented in full here, Workbooks A, B, C, and D offer a window onto these lesser-known yet illuminating works by the remarkable artist.