NEW YORK, NY.- This week, #ObjectStudies features Joseph Elmer Yoakum's The only woman ruler of Assirea Asia, Se., from 1970: a rare, vertically oriented portrait drawing that gives clues to the artist's early history, a period he spent traveling with the circus through the American West. Venus Over Manhattan has organized two presentations of Yoakum’s work: Joseph Elmer Yoakum at the gallery, and a solo presentation of his work at Art Basel Miami Beach, both in 2019. Both presentations received significant attention from the press, including reviews from Roberta Smith in the New York Times, Johanna Fateman in the New Yorker, and Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, which he titled “Why Did It Take So Long for the World to Recognize the Genius of Joseph Yoakum?” In the coming year, the first-ever retrospective of Yoakum’s work will open at the Art Institute of Chicago, from where it will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Menil Collection in Houston.

#ObjectStudies offers a detailed look at a single work by an artist associated with the gallery's program. Every week, we feature one work that is available for sale, accompanied by a short narrative detailing aspects of its history, along with documentary images, detail photographs, and archival material. The works featured in #ObjectStudies will be live on the platform for a period of seven days, and will be available only during that time.

Joseph Elmer Yoakum was an artist of African American and Native American descent, who made drawings that describe a life spent traveling, first with the circus as a young man, then with the army during World War I, and later, alone hopping train cars in the American West – all before settling in Chicago, where he committed to a life of art making around 1962. A set of competing narratives seeks to account for the details of his life: per official documentation, Joseph Elmer Yoakum was born to John Yokum (a previous spelling of the family name) and Frances Wadlow on February 20th, 1890, in Ash Grove, Missouri. But according to Yoakum, he was born in 1888, “near the village of Window Rock, Arizona, in the Southwest territory before it were [sic] made the Navajo and Apache Indian reservation.” He often claimed Navajo heritage, referring to himself as “Na-va-JOE,” but his Native American heritage can rather be traced to the Cherokee Nation, through both of his parents. Many aspects of his biography remains similarly uncertain – such as his time spent traveling with the Ringling Brothers Circus, or his role as a billposter for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show – and contribute to a picture of his life that rests between myth and fact.

The only woman ruler of Assirea Asia Se. (1970) is a rare portrait drawing by Joseph Elmer Yoakum. The vast majority of Yoakum’s production was dedicated to the depiction of visionary landscapes executed on horizontal sheets of paper, but a small and significant body of portrait drawings on vertically oriented paper comprise a meaningful aspect of his work. While the direct source for the subject of this portrait is not known, in light of Yoakum’s time spent traveling with the circus—reportedly as a personal valet to John Ringling of the Ringling Brothers’ Circus—critics have suggested that he modeled this figure on a circus performer whom he knew or had seen. The work appears to make reference to the the fan girls who danced in “Tribute to Balkis,” an extravagant performance produced by Barnum & Bailey’s circus; as Yoakum’s biographer, Derrel B. DePasse notes, “Her headdress, hairstyle, pose, and accouterments somewhat recall those of the exotic dancers in circus posters advertising such spectacles. Like the typical circus figure, the Wonder of Assirea stands with one art held aloft, the hand clasping a fan-like scepter or torch. Her other arm is bent down, with the hand resting on her waist.” Yoakum produced some three thousand works during his life, and at least four drawings feature this figure. Whitney Halstead, a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yoakum’s most ardent supporter during his life, documented these four drawings, one of which is now held in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the years before Yoakum died, in 1972, Whitney Halstead endeavored to introduce his work to wider audiences. He photographed and documented a large portion of Yoakum’s production, and introduced him to many of his students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His students at the time were a group of artists who came to be known as the Chicago Imagists, and included Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Christina Ramberg, many of whom championed, collected, and drew inspiration from Yoakum’s work. Indeed, as Roger Brown described, finding Yoakum “was like finding [Henri] Rousseau in our own backyard.” Yoakum’s success ballooned from there, culminating in a major solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized by Marcia Tucker, which opened just a month before Yoakum died.