EP. 037 - JAE

To Animate. To Motivate. To Inspire.

JAE JOSEPH

'CULTURE'S CURATOR'

Age: 40

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Jae Joseph is a content producer + art director who serves as a PR strategist to event coordinator to curator to so much more.

As long as I can remember, I have been interested in how, through our consumption of and submersion in culture, we animate, motivate and inspire ourselves and others. The best, if often unwieldy, tool we have is our emotions. It is this tool that forges and informs our connections with others and with ourselves, undergirds our art and activism and shapes the landscape of our public life together. I often think our imagination and our emotions must be intrinsically linked, dependent on each other and kindred spirits. There is a connection between what we imagine for our lives and the energy of our emotions that spurs us to action, as important today as it ever was, and our responsibility as artists and progenitors of culture is to try to stir something within the collective imagination and our emotions that not only allows us to be with others meaningfully, but to also encounter and be with ourselves.

My work and my passion is to bring ideas, art and experiences to places and spaces in new and novel ways and to foster conversations at the messy, wild and fertile intersection of our emotions and imaginations. These conversations may be with others, at dinners convened in celebration of the immense contributions our communities continue to make to Art, or more intimate conversations that never leave the tender and thoughtful terrain of our hearts. And I’m a world-builder. Sometimes I build worlds that are my own visions (because I’m an artist) and sometimes I help others build their worlds, realize their own visions. I think this ability to oscillate between my own imagination and those of people I admire acts as a bridge; and so to then invite people into those worlds and invite them to enjoy them, experience them and feel them is what gets me out of bed.

To put your art itself, the very intimate and important imaginings of your interior, out into the public theatre is also an act of bravery and it is this act of bravery that then imbues art with the potential it has for immense social good. Art and culture are a reflection of the times they are created in and so they also beckon us to better futures and to communities for whom art can act as salvation. As such, a key responsibility in my work, and one perhaps less measurable than the number of guests at an event and coverage of an art exhibition in key publications, is the impact my work can have on young people and marginalized communities. The work I do and love means I often turn over and over in my head the question, “How can I make people really feel who they are?” And so, as an art consultant and cultural producer, I not only foster conversations and help make concrete the visions of our imaginations but call forth the inherent potential of artists, activists, and citizens who want nothing more than to live in a world they deserve to inhabit.