Joseph Elmer Yoakum

Joseph Elmer Yoakum (February 20, 1890-December 25, 1972) was a self-taught artist of African-American and Native American descent who drew landscapes in a unique and highly individual style. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2000 drawings during the last decade of his life. His work is a prime example of outsider art.

Whitney Halstead of the Art Institute of Chicago was the greatest promoter of Yoakum's work during his lifetime. He believed that his story was "more invention than reality... in part myth, Yoakum's life as he would have wished to have lived it." (Depasse 2001, p. 3)

His official records state that he was born in Missouri, but Yoakum always claimed to have been born in 1888 in Arizona as a Navajo Indian. (Proud of his invented heritage, he used to pronounce "Navajo" as "Na-va-JOE.") His father was a Cherokee Indian and his mother a former slave of Cherokee, French-American, and African-American descent, but their son was always most fascinated by his Native American heritage.

When he was nine, Yoakum left home to join the Great Wallace Circus. He traveled the country, and even the world, as a billposter with five different circuses including Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the Ringling Brothers.

He returned to Missouri in 1908 and devoted himself to a family, having his first son with Myrtle Julian in 1909 and marrying her in 1910. He was drafted into the army in 1918, where he worked repairing roads and railroads as a member of the 805th Pioneer Infantry.

Yoakum never returned to his family after the war, choosing instead to travel around the United States working at odd jobs. He eventually remarried and settled down in Chicago, where he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1946. He soon left, and was drawing on a regular basis by the early 1950s.

He was discovered by the mainstream art community in 1967 by John Hopgood, an instructor at the Chicago State College who saw Yoakum's work hanging in his studio window and purchased twenty-two pictures on the spot. A group of students and teachers at the Art Institute of Chicago, including Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, took a primary interest in his work, promoting him so well that he was given a one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1972, just a month before he died.

Although he started drawing as a way to capture his memories of places like Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes from places he had never been, places like Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia and Mt Cloubelle of West India. He drew freehand with ballpoint pen, rarely having to make corrections, and colored his drawings with watercolors and pastels. He always used two lines to delineate land masses and is known for his sinuous lines and organic forms.

The autobiographical works, such as This is the flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo on July 4, 1914 in that drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving their homes for safety (sic), come from a four month period at the end of his life and are marked by a shift towards pure abstraction. WIKIPEDIA-Joseph Yoakum

Joseph Yoakum is one of my new favorite artists. He is considered an outsider artist and it is his life's story that interests me more than his artworks. I love the landscape and Yoakum draws these landscapes from his memories, which has been a minor focus of my work, in an abstracted way. His life and memories have become mythic because of the contradiction in facts and Yoakum drew imagined landscapes that he had never seen. Yoakum was an inventive storyteller and he reminds me of my father..if my father were a super cool half crazy artist...

Clarifying Outsider Art

"The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (French: [aʁ bʁyt], "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.^[1]

While Dubuffet's term is quite specific, the English term "outsider art" is often applied more broadly, to include certain self-taught or Naïve art makers who were never institutionalized. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.

Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the mainstream "art world," regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

In 1991, the first and only such organization dedicated to the study, exhibition and promotion of outsider art was formed in Chicago: Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.Henry Darger, Joseph Yoakum, Lee Godie, William Dawson, David Philpot, and Wesley Willis. Intuit maintains a non-profit museum, open to the public, which features exhibitions of art by intuitive, outsider, and self taught artists. Chicago is often recognized for its concentration of self taught and outsider artists, among them --" (Wikipedia)

Cole Rise

The images of Cole Rise evoke a surreality or sense of dreaming. His images incorporate beautiful landscapes and his subjects, when present, are always floating above the ground. I am drawn to his work for those two reasons. His landscapes remind me of many photographs I have taken of the landscapes of my home, the Shenandoah. Also his floating subjects reminded me of the series of Images I did sophomore year in Digital 1-The Ecstasy Series. Especially the one of my sister in flight over a dead cornfield with a magnificent sunset.

"Cole Rise has spent the better half of his life taking pleasure behind the lens; stalking cows and lying in the grass to capture the landscape. His work has been featured in a notable amount of international creative magazines, books, billboards, websites, posters, and even a few CD covers for bands you can find in most music stores. He can't tell you how big the universe is, or why we're really here, but his work sometimes flirts with the idea of knowing."

www.colerise.com

By The Late John Brockman, John Brockman, 1969

A collection of quotes, sentences, and paragraphs commenting on Brockman's philosophies of life, nature, man, art, the mind, etc.

In Art&Language with Tom Adair spring 09 smester we learned about Wittgenstein and the importance and power of speech. Learning to choose words is necessary because what is said needs to be what is meant, otherwise one is just making noise. Brockman manages to manifest an entirety into a few sentences. His words are extraordinary in that each page of the book may only contain a sentence or two, yet so much is said. Eloquent prose of the expounded views of John Brockman.

"All these things. All these people. All these places. All this waste, this
garbage: it’s me. There was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me,
talking to me of me. “When I dream and invent without a backward glance,
am I not . . . Nature?”

"It’s no longer possible to tell a story: life is a story. It’s a story, a narrative
series of pictures. A series of timeless tableaus, an infinitely successive
series of nows. But this can’t be. It isn’t. “A picture held us captive. And we
could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to
repeat it to us inexorably.”* The world is finite: that means “it” isn’t. We are
free from the pictures and the lives lived in the mind are at an end. Words
are what matter."

"No more art, no more artists. Actions, not objects. Ritual, not possessions.
The real artistry is in deciphering the process of neural coding. This
navigation threads the way through the clues strewn around the environment
and sets processes in motion to allow patterns to reveal themselves."

This last quote is a personal mantra for me and my artwork this semster.

You can download the entire book as an HTML from this link
www.edge.org/btljb/btljb.pdf

Iuri Kothe

http://www.iuri.art.br/cv

Iuri Kothe is a Brazilian Artist who works with photographs, photomontages, video, and audio.
He has exhibited work all over the world since 2004 and has also made appearances in magazines, on cd covers, and paper illustrations. He is a working artist who got an Electrical Engineering degree and a M. Sc. in Digital Audio Processing. He is currently working out of Rio de Janeiro and has taught classes to poor children.

"Iuri Kothe dedicates remarkable talent to the art of collage since 2003 – both analog, with pieces of magazine photographs, and digital, with pictures processed on Photoshop.
His images show good precision, aesthetic appeal and high suggestive impact and have attracted the attention of journalists, who see a peculiar form of communication; and other artists, stimulated to bring them to public exhibition."

I enjoy his photomontages because they are simple. His works are very dreamlike and have inspired me to go in a simpler direction. I also ennjoy his works because of Kothe's simple background and that he is appears humble. These works coming from someone down to earth and real make me realize it is possible to be an artist and also lead a normal life. It is attainable.

Visiting Artist: Brian Ulrich 10/14/09

Brian Ulrich's work comments on the disfunctionality of American consumerism. From Chicago, Ulrich travels far and wide in search of his next photograph and through his travels and his willingness to immediately buy a plane ticket to an abandoned mall in another state just to photograph it before it was demolished shows his passion and deidication to his obsession.
Ulrich's works branch out yet still entirely stem from one another. His non-portraiture works of shopping centers, thrift stores, donation centers, junk hoards, grocery stores, and so on all show the complete grandeur of how wasteful American consumerism is, yet the images have a humorous poke to them. I enjoy the duality of the seriousness and the humorous he evokes within each image. This series also reminds me of Andreas Gursky in his use of composition and color.

Ulrich's portraiture takes the concept from his images on consumerism and includes the workers or the purchasers as another aspect to comment on. However, in his portraits the attention is directed towards and is about the person. Those connections with his lone figures are more important than their surroundings, but I believe it is their surroundings within consumerism that separate them from the true reality of the nature of the world which is what Ulrich is trying to communicate.

My favorite images were from his DeadMall series where he ventured at night to capture images of abandoned and deteriorating malls as another comment on the dying economy of the suburbs. Ultimately I feel he is photographing the future in these images or what he believes is the future for an unsustainable economy based off of consumerism. Buy and Discard, Buy and Discard, Buy and Discard. Those malls were bought and built in the 1970s and are now discarded left to rot.

DreamSequence

These are images from a strip of 120mm film. I love the multiples upon multiples within each image, the colors, and the surprise I had when getting my film back.
I want to take this technique I used to create a photographic piece. However the finished piece is going to be the entire negative strip scanned in so as to see the entire "dream sequnce" kind of like different dreams overlapping through the night.
Not sure as to what exactly I am going to shoot, but I want to create lil mini dreamlike sequnces of imagery for the entire negative strip. It should be awesome!

Via Keller

www.psycherotica.com

Via Keller is a self taught artist living and working in rural California. Her works are psychedelic and range from photography, collages, and web design. Her collages interest me the most because I have been working with collaging to create my pieces. Her technique is superb, but it is her choice of imagery and compositions that really stand out. Yall must experience the full scope of her works by checking out her website^^^because she blows my mind. Via Keller has had artworks and writings in magazines, hired for CD covers and band T-shirts, taught classes at area schools, and has contributed to various local events and commercial projects. She is also a part-time nut picker for the Lovejoy Nut Farm.
Via Keller has been able to make a success for herself in a rural area as an artist and that is why another reason why I am interested in her. I myself loathe city living and plan on running back home to the Blue Ridge as soon as I can. She has given me a greater hope to being able to be a working artist while not relying on the city to provide work. She is a Jack of all trades. Also her works are friggin sweet. PLEASE CHECK OUT HER WEBSITE!!!!
She has a body of works called Scope that resemble kaleidoscopic imagery.

Storytime

I love stories. I love telling stories. The stories that aren't anything too special, but mean something to the storyteller. I want to collect these stories and create photos that tell those stories. The photo above is a picture of my older sister Val. We are standing on an ovrlook of the Tye River hitting the James( the James is down below us and you can't see it) the little hamlet is Norwood, VA.
Val lived down there in Norwood and as we stood there she pointed out and told me all the little stories that happened down there. For instance, she lived in a trailer on Mr. Perdue's property right by the river. She got married in the orchard. She used to take her two daughters and kayak right to the spot below where her youngest daughter first learned to swim. It was in Mr. Perdue's garden that a carolina dog showed up and adopted Val as its owner. If you look carefully you can see the Priest elev. 4oooft rising in the background and that is where the Tye river starts and flows all the way down to hit the James river 300 ft below where I took the picture.
So many little stories all within this one photograph yet no one would ever know...

Keith Carter

http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com
"Keith Carter is an internationally recognized photographer and educator. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948,he holds the endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University Beaumont, Texas. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Regional Survey Grants and the Lange-Taylor Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 1997 Keith Carter was the subject of an arts profile on the national network television show, CBS Sunday Morning. In 1998, he received Lamar University's highest teaching honor, the University Professor Award, and he was named the Lamar University Distinguished Lecturer.
Called "a poet of the ordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter's haunting, enigmatic photographs have been widely exhibited in Europe, The U.S., and Latin America. They are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston; and the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University."

Keith Carter is a self made and self taught artist/working photographer. His images are very dream-like and seem to tell little stories within an image. In his bio he talks about being raised by his mother, a photographer, and waking in the middle of the night to her darklight glowing from her makeshift darkroom in their apartment and watching the images materialize like magic. I thought this was a poetic way to be introduced to the magic of photography. Magic and dreams go hand in hand and Keith Carter's images are magic. Each black and white image tells a story but he employs backdrops, long exposures, and soft focuses to create the feeling of fleeting memories that were magically captured on film.

an excerpt from Carter's bio which contained an essay written by Bill Wittliff summarizes exactly why I am interested in Carter..
"Several years later, in 1992, Keith made “Fireflies,” in my view his first truly great, truly transcendent image. It is a photograph of two young boys in a creek bottom. They are learning over a jar held between them. Light glows from inside the jar – the magic light of the fireflies the boys had captured at dusk on that warm summer evening. It is a picture of your brother and you. It is a picture of all of us when were still new in the world, still able to be mesmerized by the most ordinary and daily of things. It is a picture to conjure memories that in most of us have lain dormant for an eternity – remembrances of having once been at one with the natural world. Only a glance at “Fireflies” and we’re back there again, our eyes full of wonder, walking barefoot through that continuous miracle that is life, and we are exalted by the experience. That is what art at its most sublime can do."