My name is Aschbel Joseph. I am a Canadian-American artist, photographer, and architectural designer of Haitian descent, displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. My practice spans painting, ceramics, mixed media, glassblowing, and spatial storytelling, rooted in the Haitian diaspora, African heritage, and collective memory.

I grew up in Haiti, and my relationship with art began quietly in childhood. I was very much to myself, so I would come home and draw what I observed. Art was mine. My peace. My language.

When the earthquake took everything in 2010, I left with nothing but memory. Not even photographs. Art became my grief, my therapy, and my way of holding onto home. I went on to study Architecture, drawn to the idea of building something out of nothing. But Haiti never left me. Six years after the earthquake I returned, camera in hand, walking streets that once shaped me, only to feel like a stranger. That experience became the foundation of everything.

My work has been recognized across exhibitions, residencies, publications, and conferences in Haiti, Canada, and beyond.

Features & Press

• Selected by ArtCloseup Magazine — 2026
• Featured in Pride of Haiti — 2026
• Featured in Vital Signs: Philanthropy and Black Communities in Quebec, Greater Montreal Foundation & Observatory of Black Communities — 2025

Exhibitions & Art Features

• Upcoming Exhibition, A Tourist in My Own Country, Ottawa — July 2026
• Page Blanche Exhibition, Montreal — 2026
• Painting featured at Shenkman Arts Centre, Ottawa, selected from 300 applicants — 2025
• Featured Artist, Women in Visual Art Exhibition, Creative Dot, Ouest, Haiti — 2022

Residencies

• Selected Artist, Page Blanche Art Residency, Montreal, one of 10 selected from 100 applicants — January 2026
• Presented A Tourist in My Own Country mini-series, Espace Louable, Montreal — 2026
• Featured Artist, Carleton University Black Soirée, Ottawa — 2026

Conferences & Talks

• Workshop Teacher, “The Blue,” Ottawa Art Gallery — 2026
• Speaker, La Conscience Haïtienne Art Conference, Ouest, Haiti — 2021

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Loving a country that doesn’t fully claim you, that’s where A Tourist in My Own Country is born.

Through painting, ceramics, mixed media, glassblowing, and spatial storytelling, I chase what displacement leaves behind: identity, memory, the West African soul that pulses through every Haitian generation no matter how far the ocean tide carries us.

Blue became my language. It speaks displacement and identity, poverty and nostalgia, all at once. In many West African traditions blue represents protection, truth, and the divine, a legacy no disaster, no political collapse, no act of erasure has ever silenced. I use it to slow the gaze of a world that watches Haiti from a distance, to make you sit inside the stillness of a people’s pain and beauty at once.

This is more than art. It is a search for community in a country that became unfamiliar, where I was made to feel like a foreigner on my own soil. A people victimized by forces beyond their making, yet still standing. Still breathing. Still creating.

This is my love letter to Haiti. A celebration of its resilience and beauty through the chaos, for a community once lost, yet to be found.

This collection does not speak of just my story. It is her story, his story, and history.