Ted Joans

Theodore Joans (July 4, 1928 – April 25, 2003) was an American beatnik, surrealist, painter, filmmaker, collageist, jazz poet and jazz trumpeter who spent long periods of time in Paris 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.

Joans's motto was: "Jazz is my religion and Surrealism my point of view".

Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, as Theodore Jones. His parents worked on the riverboats that plied the Ohio River and the Mississippi River. He played the trumpet and was an avid jazz aficionado, following Bop as it developed, and continued to espouse jazz of all styles and eras throughout his life. Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, he earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University where he encountered and translated Andre Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto by using a French dictionary before moving in 1951 to New York City, changing his surname from Jones to Joans and entering the bohemian artistic scene. Joans became friends with Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac and, for a while, was a room mate with the jazz musician Charlie Parker. During that time Joans painted in a rather Abstract Expressionist style he called Jazz Action Painting and he wrote and read his poetry, developing a personal style of oral delivery he called Jazz Poetry. He became a participant in the Beat Generation scene in Greenwich Village and was a contemporary and friend of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Kaufman, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among many others. Joans' bohemian costume balls and rent parties became rather well known, as they were photographed by Fred McDarrah and Weegee.

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." 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. 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.

He solicited a letter of support and a donation from the Parisian group for the Huey Newton Defense Fund in 1968.