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A Black Surrealist Finally Gets His Due
A solo exhibition of the poet and visual artist Ted Joans is a mostly fitting tribute to an artistic visionary.
Born on July 4 in 1928 to a family of riverboat entertainers, Joans was an artist and poet who imagined his often playful work as “hand grenades” to “explode on the enemy and unhip.” Invested in the Black American struggle and Third Worldist liberation, he traveled widely, living in Timbuktu and Tangiers and jumping between the Beat scene in Greenwich Village and Parisian Surrealist circles. While Joans was writing free-verse Surrealist imagery like “the naked beard makes sounds of dogs barking” and “the moon is pregnant with loud poems,” he offered “rent-a-beatnik” services to uptown squares, delivering poetry and jazz like a court jester with beret and bongos. Owing in part to his constant financial precarity, Joans often used found materials; the Zürcher show includes a painting on a worn cutting board and a series of drawings done on Trader Joe’s bags with the visible wrinkles of a real-life grocery run.
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