Ted Joans. Black Flower

MCBA is pleased to present the first solo exhibition dedicated to the American artist Ted Joans (1928–2003), whose prolific body of work defies categorization and brings together influences ranging from Surrealism and jazz to Black Power and Pan-Africanism.

While Joans is best known today for his literary production—spanning poetry, jazz criticism, and autobiographical writing—his visual practice was equally expansive and daring. Throughout his life, he produced a vast and varied body of drawings, collages, and experimental films, marked by formal freedom and inventive spirit. Developed through extensive research and in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together an exceptional selection of these long-neglected works.

Born in 1928, Ted Joans grew up between Louisville, Kentucky, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, areas shaped by racial segregation in the United States. He was raised in a family of performing artists who worked on steamboats and first encountered Surrealism through magazines his aunt brought home from the white households where she was employed as a domestic worker.

Erudite and experimental in his approach to art, Joans began his artistic career as a trumpeter in a bebop ensemble. After moving to New York in 1951, he settled in Greenwich Village, where the Beat Generation provided a formative artistic environment. Performing alongside figures such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, he began reading his poetry in cafés, gradually establishing his distinctive literary voice. Influenced by Langston Hughes, his writing affirms a strong Black consciousness and is marked by a driving rhythm and musicality rooted in the blues and avant-garde jazz. At the same time, Joans was developing a visual practice during the rise of Abstract Expressionism.

Confronted with ongoing racism in the United States, Joans relocated to Paris in the early 1960s and embraced a nomadic lifestyle, dividing his time between Europe and Africa. He lived for extended periods in Tangier, Morocco, and later in Timbuktu, Mali. In Paris, he became part of an African-American expatriate community and expanded his connections across European art scenes, particularly in Amsterdam and Copenhagen—where he organized politically engaged happenings—and in West Germany, where he was welcomed by countercultural and activist circles. During a residency in West Berlin in 1983–84, he began producing a series of silent 8 mm films known as the Silent Poems, conceived to be screened with a jazz accompaniment and notable for their striking and unexpected visual juxtapositions.

Across language, sound, and image, Joans transformed collage into a playful yet subversive mode of expression. Deeply rooted in Black intellectual traditions, his oeuvre also engages in a rich dialogue with Western art history. Although André Breton described him as the “only black Surrealist,” Joans’ tricontinental trajectory far exceeded the boundaries of this movement, traversing multiple intellectual, activist, and geographical contexts that the exhibition seeks to trace. Fascinated by Africa, which he called “the Surrealist continent,” he consistently sought to challenge Eurocentric narratives through a distinctive vision that aimed to reconnect people of African descent with their cultural heritage.

Curator of the exhibition: Pierre-Henri Foulon, Curator of Contemporary Art, MCBA