Ted Joans
b. 1928, Cairo, IL d. 2003, Vancouver, Canada
Poet, visual artist, trumpet player, traveler - Ted Joans’s work and life are summarized by his motto: "Jazz is my religion, Surrealism is my point of view”. His concept of poemlife recognizes a creative continuity through all lived experience and interpretation. Works of art are crystallized traces of the poemlife. Born to parents working on riverboats on the Ohio and Mississippi, raised in Ft Wayne and Louisville, he was reputedly fired as a DJ for broadcasting Little Willie Leaps 18 times in a row. He absorbed theaters and midnight rambles, played trumpet in a small combo. Alerted early to Surrealism he devoured rare journals with a French dictionary. He studied painting at Indiana U and changed his spelling to Joans for love, before lighting out for New York in 1951. Co-inventing the Beat Generation he blew his poems in coffeehouses: The Gaslight, the Bizarre, Café Wha?, the Seven Arts. He shared a small room with Bird. Wore a path from his Astor Place studio to the Five Spot and back with Kerouac, was active in 10th Street and The Club. His books fused poetry and collage, pleasure, knowledge and Black Power: Funky Beat Jazz Poems, All of Ted Joans and No More, The Hipsters. When Charlie Parker died Ted Joans covered the city in Bird Lives! In self imposed exile from the US he traveled to Timbuktu and throughout Africa, exploring Europe as well. His friendships with André Breton and Langston Hughes whom he called his spiritual fathers were deep and lasting. He lived in Tangier, turning Paul Bowles on to Albert Ayler, then used Paris as a base for decades, while remaining in motion. He read his poems with Tuareg musicians and Archie Shepp live at the Panafrican cultural festival in Algiers and participated in FESTAC. His Jazz Drawings on wood were exhibited at the Jazz Gallery in NY. He collaborated on books with poets Jayne Cortez Le Merveilleux Coup de Foudre, and Joyce Mansour, Flying Piranha. He relocated during the mid 90s to Seattle and Vancouver, collaborating on books Wow and Our Thang with his partner Laura Corsiglia. Teducation, selected poems was published in 1999. His work in all media invokes the imagination as spiritual self defense. His visual practice includes paintings, collages, drawings, assemblages and the surrealist exquisite corpse drawing, including the 132-person Long Distance, presented by David Hammons in Lisbon in 2019 and shown in the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Met, New York (October 11, 2021 - January 30, 2022) and Tate Modern, London (February 24, 2022 - August 29, 2022). Bird Lives!, 1958, is part of the permanent collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
TED JOANS EXHIBITIONS 2024-2025
Fort Worth, TX: Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940
Organized by Curator Maria Elena Ortiz, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
March 10 - July 28, 2024
Richmond, VA: Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
June 1 - November 17, 2024
Paris: Ted Joans, Dirty Rainbow (1981), curated by Gwenolee Zürcher
Galerie Pixi, 95 rue de Seine, Paris
September 2 - October 9, 2024
Paris: Surréalisme, Centre Pompidou, Paris
September 3, 2024 - January 13, 2025
New York: Ted Joans, Jazz is my Religion, Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker St, New York
September 12 - October 29, 2024
Paris: Ted Joans, Bill Dixon, Oliver Lake, Zürcher Gallery, Outsider Paris, Le Molière, Paris
Opening Monday, October 14th
October 14 - 20, 2024
Munich: But live here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism
Lenbachhaus, Kunstbau, Munich
Opening Monday, October 14th, 7-11 pm
October 15, 2024 - March 2, 2025
New York: Vital Signs, Artists and the Body, curated by Lanka Tattersall at MoMA, NY
November 3, 2024 - February 22, 2025
Paris: Paris Noir, Centre Pompidou, Paris
March 19 - June 30, 2025
