Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life—long wanderer. Pan—Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem—life.” Ted Joans (1928—2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work.

The proportions of Ted Joans's life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s...