Pierre-Joseph Valcin was born in Port-au-Prince in 1925. Valcin worked as a mechanic and stone mason before becoming a painter. Valcin began to paint after he was introduced to the Centre d’Art by his half-brother, the late painter Gerard Valcin, in 1959. Gerard Valcin instructed Pierre-Joseph for his first year at the Centre d’Art. While much of his work owes a debt to Gerard’s instruction, it was always looser, less stylized and more intuitive than his master’s. Pierre-Joseph continued to paint through the 1990’s. He passed away in 2000. Pierre-Joseph Valcin’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Musée d’Art Haitien, the Davenport (Iowa) Museum of Art and the Waterloo (Iowa) Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. It is published in Haitian Arts (Nadal-Gardere and Bloncourt, 1986), Haiti: Art Naif, Art Vodou (1988), Dialogue du Réel et de l’Imaginaire (1990), Haiti: Actualities and Belief (Roche, 1990), Island on Fire (Demme, 1997).