Ted Joans

Black Flower

“Jazz is my religion and Surrealism my point of view”—Ted Joans

The American artist Ted Joans (b. Cairo, Illinois, 1928; d. Vancouver, British Columbia, 2003) played trumpet in a bebop band, settled in New York in the early 1950s, and became part of the creative milieu of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in cafés and organizing Surrealist parties. From the 1960s onward, he lived and worked across Africa and Europe, circulating through avant-garde networks. His literary oeuvre developed alongside a growing body of visual art, including drawings, collages, and experimental films shaped by Surrealism, jazz, Black Power, and Pan-Africanism. Working across words, sounds, and images, Joans refined collage into a playful yet subversive aesthetic practice and worldview. His work is deeply informed by the Black intellectual tradition and studded with references to Western art history. 

This extraordinary oeuvre is now published for the first time; the exhibition and catalogue Black Flower were realized in close collaboration with the artist’s estate. In addition to comprehensive documentation of his works, the catalogue provides access to unpublished archival materials and gathers writings by Karima Boudou, Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis, Eleonora Del Duca, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Joanna Pawlik, Gregory Pierrot, Abigail Susik, and the editor and curator Pierre-Henri Foulon.