BLAISE JOSEPH
Blaise Joseph is a practicing artist and a farmer from Kerala, India, with nearly two decades of experience in art-based education. He spent 16 formative years as a Jesuit scholastic in Bihar, where he had the opportunity to work with the Musahars — one of the most oppressed caste groups in India — especially their children whose extraordinary artistic talents had a great influence on him as a community-based art practitioner.
Together with his artist-collaborator, Atreyee Day, he designed community-based art-education projects for several Indian and international organisations facilitating art workshops/projects and also developing art-based curricula for different learning communities. His works majorly addressed learning spaces in tribal-dominated government schools, educational institutions, orphanages, prisons, and family spaces in several parts of the country.
Since 2018, Blaise has been the Program Director of the Art By Children Program of Kochi Biennale Foundation where he curates and coordinates its Art Room project on site, as well as in selected government schools. The Art Room Project continued during Covid through a Learning at Home program, which engaged over 120 families in art activities for more than a year. In the art workshops and projects that he facilitates for the ABC Program, he engages with children and their families to explore creative possibilities in their living circumstances and critically think about their everyday realities through art.
The core value of his art interventions is to co-create non-competitive, non-judgmental, fearless and creative artversities for people to engage in the process of exploring creativity. Art is the basis of empathetic and humane learning which is multidimensional.
