Ted Joans. Black Flower

MCBA is pleased to present the first solo show devoted to the American artist Ted Joans (1928-2003), the creator of a teeming unclassifiable body of work that blends influences as diverse as Surrealism, jazz, Black Power, and Pan-Africanism.

Although his literary output, which mixes poetry, jazz reviews, and autobiographical pieces, is better known today than the rest of his work, Ted Joans also produced, throughout his life, a visual piece that is remarkable for its variety, formal freedom, and inventiveness. Largely overlooked until now, a significant part of these drawings, collages, and experimental films have yet to be discovered. The result of in-depth research and close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together for the first time a collection of these exceptional works of art.

Born in 1928, Ted Joans grew up between Louisville (Kentucky) and Fort Wayne (Indiana) in segregated America in a family of performing artists who worked on steamboats. He discovered Surrealism in the magazines his aunt was allowed to bring home from the white families where she worked as a domestic servant.

Erudite and experimental in his approach to art, Joans began his career as a trumpetist in a bebop group. In 1951 he moved to New York and settled in Greenwich Village. The Beat Generation was his artistic cradle and it was beside Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka that he began to read his poems in cafés, little by little asserting his singular voice as a writer. Influenced by the writings of Langston Hughes, Joans’ literary style asserts a Black consciousness and displays an intense rhythm and deeply musical language that spring from Blues and avant-garde jazz. Alongside his literary output, Joans was developing a pictorial practice at a time when Abstract Expressionism was taking hold of the art scene.

In the face of persistent racism in the United States, Joans decided to move to Paris in the early 1960s and adopted a nomadic way of life, dividing his time between Europe and Africa, where he lived for part of the year – initially in Tangier, Morocco, then later in Timbuktu, Mali. In Paris he joined an African-American expat community and broadened his ties to other art circles, notably in Amsterdam and Copenhagen –  where he organised politically committed happenings – and in West Germany, where he was warmly welcomed into militant milieus of the counterculture. It was during a residency in West Berlin in 1983-84 that he began a series of silent short 8 mm films, the Silent Poems. Meant to be screened with a jazz accompaniment, these pieces create unexpected and often stunning juxtapositions.

Through words, sounds, and images, Joans made collage an artistic form of expression that is both playful and subversive. His hybrid body of work, drawing generously on the Black intellectual tradition, also teems with references to the history of Western art. Although André Breton recognised him as the ‘only African-American Surrealist’, Joans, along with Amiri Baraka, was part of a broader tradition that is termed ‘Afro-Surrealist’. He was fascinated by Africa, which he called ‘the Surrealist continent’, and worked hard to deconstruct Eurocentric narratives, driven by a Pan-African commitment that aimed to reconnect peoples of African descent and their cultural roots.

Curator of the exhibition: Pierre-Henri Foulon, curator of contemporary art, MCBA