Ted Joans is remembered as a tirelessly traveling artist. A member of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, he declaimed his texts to the rhythm of bebop jazz in the cafés of Greenwich Village. Nourished by jazz, he simultaneously developed a Surrealist practice, which he put in the service of Black emancipation movements and Pan-Africanism.

Confronted with racism in the United States, he left his native country in the early 1960s and from then on divided his life between Europe and Africa, a continent that became an essential source of inspiration for his work.

An artist working with many media, Ted Joans is presented in the exhibition through his paintings, drawings, and archives, as well as his Super 8 films, made from the early 1980s onward, which he described as "silent poems." Jazz, the common thread running through the exhibition, echoes both his travels and his creative output.

Driven by a collective spirit, Joans created some of his best-known works in the form of "cadavre exquis", which the exhibition highlights, in particular The Seven Sons of Lautréamont (1973–1975), created with six artists from Latin America and the Caribbean, including Hervé Télémaque, born in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). The exhibition thus showcases works by each of these six artists, including Hervé Télémaque's Portrait de Famille (1962–1963), on loan from the Fondation.