Antonio Joseph, one of the early masters of Haitian art, was born in Barahona, the Dominican Republic, of Haitian parents in 1921. He moved to Haiti with his family in 1937 after Trujillo's massacre. Antonio worked in Port-au-Prince as a tailor. He was one of the first ones who joined the Centre d'Art early in 1944, studying watercolor, drawing, and sculpture under Dewitt Peters, Jason Seley, William Calfee, Robel Paris, Paul Keen and rapidly developed a style of his own. Antonio collaborated with Oierre Bourdelle in the period 1945-49 on a series of murals for the Port-au-Prince bicentennial. In 1972, he joined the administrative council of the Museum of Haitian Art at St. Pierre College in Port-au-Prince. He taught drawing and screen-printing at the Centre d'Art. Joseph, whose work was world-renowned as early as 1952, received two Guggenheim Foundation awards in 1953 and 1957. In 1945, he participated in "La Havane" exposition. In 1946, exhibited in Paris with UNESCO. He had shown in the U.S., France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Germany, and Switzerland. His work is also in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the St. Pierre's College Museum, and the Nader's Museum of Art. Notable books on Haitian naive and primitive art cited his art. "Were it not for Picasso, Joseph might have been the inventor of cubism," states Gérald Alexis, author and art critic in his book Peintres Haitiens. Antonio sadly passed away on May 7, 2016.