Black Surrealist : The Legend of Ted Joans

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem-life.” Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work.

The proportions of Ted Joans’s life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his “jazz action” paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success, Joans left the States for Europe and Africa, and set up bases of operation in places such as Paris, Copenhagen, Tangier, and Timbuktu. He would spend the subsequent decades in constant movement around the globe, an itinerant poet, interdisciplinary artist, and self-styled “Surrealist griot” who was especially attuned to the magnetic power of chance encounters. He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa—all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own “poem-life."

Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans’s vast body of unpublished—and previously-unseen—work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Ted Joans’s poem-life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.