Ted Joans: Black Flower

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA) presents Ted Joans. Black Flower, the first monographic exhibition devoted to Ted Joans (1928–2003), a major figure of the Beat Generation and international Surrealism. Developed in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together a dispersed body of works and archival material, shedding new light on a visual practice long overshadowed by his writing.

A poet and visual artist, Joans was immersed in jazz throughout his life. Raised in segregated Kentucky, he joined Greenwich Village’s bohemian circles in the 1950s before developing a tricontinental life connecting New York, Paris, Tangier and Timbuktu. He described himself as a “jazz poet” and a Surrealist, while resisting fixed disciplinary and cultural categories. His engagement with Black Power and Pan-Africanism connected his artistic practice to struggles for Black emancipation, anti-colonial politics and diasporic exchange. Across drawing, collage, poetry, film, readings and happenings, jazz offered a model of rhythm, improvisation and variation, while Surrealism provided a means of freeing the imagination and transforming reality.

Rather than following a chronological narrative, the exhibition adopts Joans’ associative logic. Works, manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, sound documents and films form a network of echoes, repetitions and affinities, like fragments in a collage or variations in a jazz composition. Collage is key to his approach: extracting, displacing, juxtaposing and reassembling images, words, histories and geographies to unsettle relations of visibility and power and create new constellations of meaning. The Teducation Films, begun in West Berlin in 1983, extend this logic of collage into the moving image. Conceived as “silent poems” and informed by Surrealist cinema, these Super 8 films juxtapose places, encounters and visual fragments. Digitized for the exhibition, around twenty of them will be shown for the first time.

Community was not simply the social context of his work but one of its defining methods: friendships and affinities across generations, disciplines and continents became part of the work. This is evident in collaborative works such as the exquisite corpse Long Distance, begun in 1976 and developed over almost three decades with 132 participants.

Black Flower, the title of the exhibition and its publication, recurs in Joans’ writings as a figure of affirmation, resistance and emancipation. Joans saw himself as a “black flower,” rooted in African American experience yet able to blossom elsewhere, beyond imposed boundaries. The metaphor frames a transnational practice that resonates with reassessments of cultural circulation, artistic networks and the global history of postwar art and culture.

Exhibition curator
Pierre-Henri Foulon, Curator of Contemporary Art, MCBA

About Ted Joans
Ted Joans (1928–2003) was born in Cairo, Illinois, and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky. He encountered Surrealism early and played trumpet in Louisville before moving to New York in 1953, where he exhibited his work and joined Greenwich Village’s artistic circles. From 1960 onward, his life and practice became nomadic: Paris, Tangier and Timbuktu emerged as anchor points within a geography extending across Europe, Africa and the United States. Exhibitions, readings, collaborations and friendships developed across these contexts, making circulation itself a defining condition of his artistic trajectory. He died in 2003 in Vancouver.

Joans’ visual work has received growing institutional attention in recent years. It was featured in Surrealism Beyond Borders at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021–22), subsequently presented at Tate Modern, London (2022); But Live Here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism at Lenbachhaus, Kunstbau, Munich (2024–25) and Paris Noir. Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950–2000 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2025).

Publication
Pierre-Henri Foulon (ed.), Ted Joans. Black Flower, with contributions by Karima Boudou, Valerie Cassel Olivier, Eleonora Del Duca, Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis, Pierre-Henri Foulon, Joanna Pawlik, Grégory Pierrot, and Abigail Susik. Berlin, DISTANZ, French & English editions, 276 pp. CHF 39 / EUR 40.

For more information on the full public program, visit mcba.ch