Quick, name a Black Beat poet.
Ted Joans, a participant in Greenwich Village’s Beat Generation, counted among his friends celebrated writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Leroi Jones and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Like his friends, Joans performed at New York City spots such as Gaslight Café, the Artists Club and Café Bizarre.
Using his fine arts degree from Indiana University as a jumping-off point, he began to paint in a style he called jazz action. He called his personal style of oral delivery, infused with jazz sensibilities and rhythmic timing, jazz poetry. For a time, he even played the trumpet and shared a room with jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker.
After embracing Salvador Dali and Surrealism, a movement both philosophical and politically revolutionary, Joans eventually broke with Dali and became part of Surrealist André Breton’s circle. Their friendship was a strong one and Breton considered him the sole Black Surrealist.
The experimental jazz musician, poet and painter came to be associated with bebop jazz, Surrealism and Beat poetry, all 20th-century movements that helped shape modern-day artistic expression. An ardent Africanist who travelled widely around the African continent, Joans’ portrait figures from his 1956 trip are now on display at the VMFA in a new exhibition, “Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri.” The works underscore Joans’ passion for Africa and his commitment to Surrealism.

These 31 works in watercolor, ink, pencil, collage and crayon reflect the people Joans met during his African sojourn. The exhibit’s title comes not only from his painting of that name, but from his adopted persona of the rhinoceros, which often appeared in his paintings and writings. According to Joans, “Africa is a surrealistic continent, thus the most marvelous.”
Black faces and bodies are presented to the viewer, some straight on, others in profile, some clothed, others nude and some, such as “Untitled (Kidoga),” highly stylized. The watercolor “Untitled (Timbuktoo)” shows a man in a loincloth pulling back an arrow, the arc of his bow mirroring the curve of his back. The full and half-length portraits include a range of traditional and contemporary African styles of dress and headwear, as they were being worn in 1956.

pencil on board. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Regenia Perry, 2020.394.
VMFA was gifted the Joans works from author, scholar and longtime VCU art history professor Dr. Regenia Perry. In addition to the art on display are some of Joans’ books, including “All of Ted Joans and No More,” (1961), “Black Pow-Wow Jazz Poetry” (1969), and “Afrodisia: Old & New Poems by Ted Joans” (1976).
“A Black First” is from his “Black Pow-Wow Jazz Poetry” book.
I crossed the Sahara
hitchhiked alone
I crossed
the great desert
made history as
a black first
crossing the Sahara
Someday you’ll read
about me
crossing that Sahara
I guess
when I’m gone
cause so many black firsts
die unknown
Joans originated the “Bird Lives” legend and graffiti in New York City after the death in March 1955 of his friend and former roommate, Charlie Parker, and his painting “Bird Lives” hangs in in San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum. Even when Joans stopped playing trumpet, he kept a jazz sensibility in the reading of his poems, and often collaborated with other musicians.

From the 1960s on, Joans travelled extensively, maintaining a house first in Tangier, Morocco and then in Timbuktu, where he spent his winters. He was an active and enthusiastic correspondent with other creatives such as Stokely Carmichael, author Paul Bowles and Langston Hughes. Their friendship went back to when Joans frequently accompanied Hughes’ with his trumpet playing at readings in Paris and New York City.
Joans’ moto was: “Jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view.” Viewing Africans circa 1956 through Joans’ eyes makes for a compelling and long overdue look at an artist who helped shape contemporary artistic expression from poetry to jazz and painting.
The man who achieved so many Black firsts deserves a wider audience.
“Ted Joans” Land of the Rhinoceri” is on display through Nov. 17 at VMFA, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Blvd., vmfa.museum