Photograph taken by Jan in the early 1960’s in New York City.
In 1950 Yoors traveled to New York at the suggestion of a family friend. Although his passport labeled him as a journalist on a temporary visa, Yoors fell in love with the city and decided to stay, setting up a studio space and constructing and setting up fifteen-foot vertical loom. Annebert and Marianne joined him the following year and together the three continued producing tapestries, from which they had since decided to make a living. Yoors would design the tapestries, producing the large-scale cartoons from which Marianne and Annebert would weave the final design on the loom. In the studio, Yoors continued producing work in other media including painting, sculpture, and gouaches.
In 1957 Yoors received a 35mm Pentax camera, adding street and abstract photography to media in which he worked. In 1961, in collaboration with French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau Yoors took up the cinema camera for the documentary Only One New York. A book with the same title followed, comprising Yoors’s still photographs of the communities in the film. Another project in 1967 took Yoors around the world photographing postwar religious architecture for the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and the Visual Arts during which he had the opportunity to add to his own photographic oeuvre and garner further inspiration for his work in other media.
In New York, Yoors also formed relationships with a number of abstract expressionist artists, immersing himself in the vibrancy of New York’s art world. Although Yoors did not work through a dealer he had no issue getting shows and exhibitions, forming a roster of collectors, including private individuals, museums, corporations, and religious institutions.
Three children were born to Yoors in New York; his first, a daughter, Lyuba in 1963, his first son Vanya in 1965, and his youngest son Kore in 1968. Yoors died of a heart attack after at the age of 55 after a long struggle with diabetes, contracted from poor nutrition during the war years, on Thanksgiving Day. He left behind hundreds of designs for unwoven tapestries, which his partners, Annebert and Marianne, continued realizing for years after his death.
