Jasmin Joseph

Jasmin Joseph, born 23 November 1923, in Grande Riviere in northern Haiti, was working in a brick factory and sculpting in clay when his work was noticed by American sculptor Jason Seeley an American sculptor who partnered with Dewitt Peters – a watercolorist — to establish the Centre D’Art in Port-au-Prince. Encouraged by Seeley, he joined the Centre d' Art in 1948 where he practiced sculpture and painting.

 In the early 1950s he contributed to a mural depicting "The Stations of the Cross" and created a choir screen of open-sculpted terra cotta for the Episcopal Cathedral of Ste Trinité. [Destroyed in the earthquake of January 2010.]

 He abandoned sculpture after finding that unauthorized molds had been made of some of his terra cotta work and copies were being sold to profit the thief. He painted exclusively after that.

Jasmin Joseph died in 2005.

 Permanent Collections:

Waterloo Center for the Arts, Waterloo, Iowa

Musée d'Art Haitien du College Saint Pierre, Port-au-Prince

The Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa

Milwaukee Museum of Art

The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut

New Orleans Museum of Art.

Published in:

[na]. The Naive Tradition: Haiti. Milwaukee Art Center, 1974.

Demme, Jonathan. Island on Fire. Kaliko Press, 1997.

Material Culture. Direct From The Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self-Taught Art. Philadelphia, 2014.

Rodman, Selden. The Miracle of Haitian Art. New York, 1974.

-. Where Art is Joy. New York, 1988.

Stebich, Ute. Haitian Art. The Brooklyn Museum, 1978.

-. A Haitian Celebration. Milwaukee Art Museum, 1992.

Nadal, Marie-Jose and Gerald Bloncourt. 1986. La Peinture Haitienne, Haitian Arts. Paris: Editions Nathan