Jazz is My Religionruns through October 29 at Zurcher Gallery.
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Or, as he put it, Im the Crispus Attucks of the Beat Generation.
Beat poetrys Surrealist aesthetic, Joans felt, was also borrowed from Black culture.
(The conceptual artist David Hammons eventurned it into his own film.)
in charcoal on sidewalks and walls.
Another avian piece from the following year busily overlays a label-heavy scrap of cardboard box with the Bird Lives!
silhouette and Joanss name in Japanese characters.
Within the figure, Charlie Parker is written over and again, like aBart Simpson chalkboard punishment.
He looks in all directions at once, his bearded mouth halfway between a grin and a grimace.
Many of the bags also feature rhinoceroses, a frequent presence in Joanss art.
(He often carried around a rhino rubber stamp.)
Africa where the rhinos roam, he writes in a poem, you are in me.
Joans saw a tradition of Surrealism already present in many indigenous African cultures.
But his sometimes romantic view of the continent is spiked with a poignant critique of imperialism.
Africa is like me!
Black / Big / complex, another of his poems goes, and not yet free.
It was never solely an art movement, but a full-service program for envisioning a better world.
Martiniques contemporaneousNegritudemovement made fruitful use of Surrealism alongside Marxism, colonial resistance, and an embrace of Blackness.
They seem to reflect variations in what Joans took from the relationships.
But looking back, for Joans, is never about nostalgia.
The spirit of jazz whose angels Joans trumpeted for his entire life, shouting Bird Lives!
from the canvas isnt ultimately about genre.
Correction: An earlier version of this post referring to an inked image as a painting.
