Highlights from the Cartin Collection

“I learned of Joseph Yoakum—a powerful dreamer and artist—in a rather conventional way. I saw one here and one there from 1989 to 2004 at a few dealers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. He had already died, so I conducted my own inquiries, asked hundreds of questions, and came to believe I was understanding these powerful fantasies of imaginary destinations. I also learned to reject this idea of the outsider artist and all its pejorative implications. That he was from a very small group of artists—outsiders as opposed to insiders like Edward Hopper, for example?—who had authentically come from a ‘culture of one’ was a consideration I pondered as poetic and plausible but also ultimately rejected. Yoakum lived in Chicago, he was employed by and traveled extensively with itinerant circuses and carnivals. He had his culture, but much more evident was the power of his curiosity and imagination and the magnificent form he gave to it in these wondrous things. I visited with Jim Nutt, an early Yoakum advocate and collector, in his studio. That visit itself was a wonderful mind-shifting experience for me, and I saw the sense of awe over Yoakum in Nutt’s eyes as he spoke of him. So it took fifteen years to put this group of six pictures together, and in each case I knew it was ‘the one.’ I wonder if you might agree?”