Solar Sistah

Ted Joans was a poet, musician, and visual artist, whose work intersects with many intellectual, political, and social movements of the twentieth century. A close friend of famed jazz musician Charlie Parker, Joans adopted the motto, "Jazz is my religion, surrealism is my point of view," not only to describe the forms of his artistic improvisation, but his personal attitude to life. In 1990 he began Some Sum (of our Ancestors were Old Masters too!), a series of collages on souvenir art postcards in which he inserted a Black figure into the composition or covered the face of an existing figure with that of a Black man or woman. Often the latter were musicians and singers such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, among others. Drawing on the legacy of Surrealism, Joans's collages produce both humorous insights and razor-sharp critiques of mainstream cultural criteria for determining historical worth, aesthetic taste, and financial value.