Lemaire Organizes An Exhibition To Celebrate Artist Joseph E. Yoakum

From March 3 to 13, Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran, the creative pair behind the Lemaire fashion company, will host an exhibition titled “INSCAPE: In the Depths of Joseph E. Yoakum’s Landscapes.”

This exhibition, which will be presented at Galerie Derouillon in Paris (38 street Notre-Dame de Nazareth, IIIème), will introduce the painter and drawer to France for the first time, showcasing his work in the country. Joseph Elmer Yoakum ‘s (1891-1972) idiosyncratic view of landscapes is fueled by his travels across the world and his experience of World War I. The self-taught visual artist built aromantic postcard-inspired world, drawing more than two thousand immersive full-page landscapes from memory, which retrace his nomadic life spent visiting territories in the United States and abroad.

Lemaire and Tran were so moved by the artist’s work that they decided to include his sketches and patterns in a series of silk items for their Spring/Summer 2022 collection. The collection comprises a rectangular dress featuring Yoakum’s landscapes, a T-shirt dress, a men’s shirt, a scarf, a purse, and blanket-skirt paying respect to the artist’s illustrations.

He is of mixed ancestry, claiming Cherokee Nation Native American heritage through his parents, as well as African and American lineage. He referred to himself as the “Old Black Man” who was guided by God and claimed to have traveled to every continent — except Antarctica — “as a hobo and stowaway”: first as a child when he joined a circus, then as a young soldier during World War I (which took him to France), and later, alone, by train, across the Western United States, before settling in Chicago at the age of 70 and devoting himself to creating art every day.

His work is currently held in several public collections and is the subject of numerous prestigious individual and group exhibitions, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which is presenting the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition from November 28, 2021, to March 19, 2022, called Joseph Elmer Yoakum : What I Saw.