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Theodore Joans (July 4, 1928 – April 25, 2003) was an American beatnik, surrealist,[1] Jonathon Keats, "An Eye-Opening Met Exhibit Shows The Full Gamut Of Surrealist Art From Asia To Africa To North And South America"], Forbes, October 30, 2021 Painting, filmmaker, ,[2] Surrealism at The Tate Jazz poetry and jazz trumpeter who spent long periods of time in Paris[3] Remembering Ted Joans: Black Beat Surrealist by Justin Desmangles while also traveling through Africa. His complex body of work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde artistic streams. He was the author of more than 30 books of poetry, prose, and collage; among them Black Pow-Wow, Beat Funky Jazz Poems, Afrodisia, Jazz is Our Religion, Double Trouble, WOW and Teducation. In 2001 he was the recipient of Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award.
In visual art, Joans is best known for creating a more than 30-foot-long chain of drawings and collages on dot matrix printer computer paper called Long Distance Exquisite Corpse (1976–2003), an extended exquisite corpse of 132 invited contributors, including Paul Bowles, Breyten Breytenbach, William S. Burroughs, Mário Cesariny, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bruce Conner, Laura Corsiglia, Bill Dixon, Allen Ginsberg, David Hammons, Stanley William Hayter, Dick Higgins, Konrad Klapheck, Alison Knowles, Michel Leiris, Malangatana, Roberto Matta, Octavio Paz, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Wole Soyinka, Dorothea Tanning and Cecil Taylor.[4] David Hammons’s Ted Joans: Exquisite Corpse by Bruno Marchand
Joans's motto was: "Jazz is my religion and Surrealism my point of view".
Choosing to lead an increasingly expatriate artist's life, Joans became involved in the intelligentsia around the Surrealism art movement after meeting Joseph Cornell and later becoming close to his childhood painter-hero Salvador Dalí in Paris before breaking with him. Joans had moved to Paris in the 1960s and was welcomed into the Surrealist circle of André Breton and by James Baldwin. He learned the French language and frequented the café Les Deux Magots in Saint Germain des Prés where he received mail and other messages. He remained mostly in Paris until the mid-1990s, spending his summers in Europe and winters in Timbuktu in Mali. Joans also became active in African studies and traveled extensively throughout the African continent, frequently on foot, over many decades between periods of living in Europe and North America. As publisher John Calder noted, "Joans adapted himself to the lifestyles of artists in Harlem and Greenwich Village, the London of the 1950s and 60s, the Paris of the 60s to the 90s, as well as to those of other European cities and Timbuktu, where he spent many winters."John Calder, "Ted Joans" (obituary), The Guardian, May 27, 2003. From the 1960s onward, Joans had a house in Tangier, Morocco, and then in Timbuktu. While he ceased playing the trumpet, he maintained a jazz sensibility in the reading of his poems and frequently collaborated with musicians. He continued to travel and maintained an active correspondence with a host of creative individuals, among them Langston Hughes, Michel Leiris, Aimé Césaire, Robert Creeley, Jake Lamar, James Baldwin, Jayne Cortez, Stokely Carmichael, Ishmael Reed, Paul Bowles, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. Many letters between Joans and these and others are collected at the Bancroft Library of the University of California Berkeley, while the University of Delaware houses his correspondence with Charles Henri Ford. Joans was also a close correspondent/participant of the Chicago Surrealist Group.
Joans' painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. Ted Joans, 74, Jazzy Beat Poet Known for Bird Lives Graffiti, The New York Times, May 18, 2003. He was also the originator of the Bird Lives urban legend and graffiti street art in and about New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in 1955. In his essay "Sounding Across the City: Ted Joans's 'Bird Lives!' as Jazz Performance", the cultural and literary studies scholar Amor Kohli has argued that this grafitti reflects Joans' expression of a jazz aesthetic.
Joans visual art work spans Max Ernst-like collages, assemblage, paintings and drawings; including many resulting from the collaborative surrealist game of Cadavre exquis. The rhinoceros is a frequent subject in his work. He also created short Super 8 films.
Joans often satirized American middle-class values in poems such as Playmates. A strong and cruel humorous streak is apparent in his work when depicting the white bourgeoisie and their philistine attitudes, particularly around racial prejudice. His poems and art often explored social/racial issues from the perspective of his experiences of a black minority member within a white majority society. During the early 1980s, he was a writer in residence in Berlin under the auspices of the DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst) program. He also was a contributor of jazz essays and reviews to magazines such as Coda and Jazz Magazine. His autobiographical text Je Me Vois appeared in the Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Series, Volume 25, published by Gale Research.
His work has been included in numerous anthologies, including The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970 (1970), edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (1970), A Broadside Treasury, edited by Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), and For Malcolm, edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs (1973). More recent publications on Joans include the anthology Teducation and Our Thang, a collection of his poems and paintings by his friend Laura Corsiglia.
In the late 1990s Joans relocated from Europe to Seattle before moving to Vancouver, British Columbia, between travels, until his death. Joans died in Vancouver, due to complications from diabetes. He fathered 10 children: Daline Jones-Weber of San Leandro (named after Salvador Dalí), Ted Jones of Santa Monica, Teresa Jordan of Whittier, JeanneMarie Jones of Rialto, Robert Jones of Long Beach, Lars Jones of Oslo, Norway, Thor Jones of Oslo, Norway, Russell Jones of Scotland, Sylvia Jones and Yvette Jones-Johnson. Ted Joans – Beat Generation poet and artist by Chuck Squatriglia, Chronicle Staff Writer, May 10, 2003
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