Isasi and Tossin Named Freund Fellows
2024-10-25 • Sam Fox School
Blas Isasi, An idea is just the shape of a flower, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts shared that the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows have been named for the current and next academic years: Blas Isasi Gutiérrez (2024-25) and Clarissa Tossin (2025-26). The fellowship comprises teaching a course at the Sam Fox School and creating work for exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Amy Hauft, director of the College & Graduate School of Art, is effusive about both artists. “We had an applicant pool absolutely brimming with talent,” she said. “Both artists deploy tactility in the presentation of their artworks, a tactility that delivers complex understandings about our world and times. Their consecutive projects make for a marvelous tennis match of ideas.”
“We are very excited to host the exhibitions of both artists at the Saint Louis Art Museum,” said Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum. “Both have a sophisticated approach to art making, and they interrogate complex narratives around history and colonialism. They also both happen to be South American, highlighting the vibrancy of contemporary art currently being produced on that continent.”
Isasi will arrive on campus in spring 2025, where he will teach a course centered on wood, called Material Experimentation: Against Reading Against the Grain. “We will spend the semester learning how to read wood’s will and desires,” Isasi shared. “For example, how to release the potential energy in the form of tension stored in dimensioned wood, the same tension that is expressed in the warping of boards and sticks that woodworkers try to fight back and correct. It’s about a radical de-centering of the human subject where the student’s skills and artistry will be at the service of a non-sentient entity’s expressive needs. Authorship will dissolve, projects [will be] the result of a collective undertaking, we will fight back the self that turns the world into a mirror reflecting our own gaze.“
During their fellowships, both artists will spend time working in studio space alongside MFA in Visual Art candidates as they create work for their solo exhibitions in the museum’s Currents series. Isasi’s project will center on his conjectures regarding "The weight of a gaze (is to listen to the sound of a kilogram).”
About Blas Isasi Gutiérrez
Isasi is a Peruvian visual artist living and working in New Orleans. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in painting from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Tulane University. Isasi is also an alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie, an arts post-academic program in Maastricht, in the Netherlands. He is also a former recipient of the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship, consisting of a yearlong artist residency in Brunswick, Germany. In 2021, he was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center.
Isasi’s recent work explores the aesthetics and poetics of the Peruvian desert as an entry point to investigating Andean cosmology and its potential to shed light on key aspects of our troubled present that remain obscure. His goal is not to re-enchant the world after Modernity´s failure as a totalizing project, but to highlight and reveal the cosmic forces that never cease to shape politics, society, culture, economy, materiality, and reality as a whole. Isasi has exhibited in many venues across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. He is participating in “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home,” New Orleans’ triennale curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson, MFA ’06.
Clarissa Tossin, Future Geography: Cosmic Cliffs, 2023, used amazon.com delivery boxes, archival inkjet print on photo paper with lamination, walnut, 60 × 71.5 in (152 × 182 cm), © Photo: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy of the artist
About Clarissa Tossin
Clarissa Tossin, who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2000 and Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 2009, works with moving-image, sculpture, and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonization. Through a mix of research, storytelling, and gestures of mapping and layering, Tossin places seemingly disparate elements into conversation, generating unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. Tossin’s childhood in Brasília heavily influenced her early films and installations deconstructing Brazil’s modernist history, which over the years has expanded to encompass geographies ranging from her adopted home of Los Angeles to the vast realms of outer space. — Mariana Fernández Tossin was included in this year’s Whitney Biennial and coincidentally, is also participating in “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home,” in New Orleans this fall.
About the Freund Fellowship
Established in 1986, the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship promotes the exhibition of contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum as well as the teaching an art course at the Sam Fox School. The fellowship centers on two core components: teaching in the College of Art and producing work for a solo exhibition for the museum’s Currents series.