By Andrea K. Scott
In 1962, Joseph Elmer Yoakum, a Black Army veteran living on the South Side of Chicago, who had no experience making art, had a dream that instructed him to take up drawing. He was seventy-one. By 1971, Yoakum’s vivid, otherworldly landscapes were hanging in a group show at moma, alongside the work of such established figures as Saul Steinberg and Jack Whitten. (Yoakum died the following year.) This winter, the museum surveys his ten-year career in “Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw.” (Opens on Nov. 21.)
