An idea is just the shape of a flower, 2022
Blas Isasi | Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture
Blas Isasi will deliver the 2025 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
The Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Saint Louis Art Museum, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles. Fellows teaching in the Sam Fox School’s College of Art, and produce work for a solo exhibition in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Currents series.
About Blas Isasi
Blas 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 post-academic arts program in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He is also a former recipient of the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship, consisting of a year-long artist residency in Brunswick, Germany.
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 ceased to shape politics, society, culture, economy, materiality, and reality as a whole. Isasi has exhibited in many venues across Latin America, the U.S., and Europe. In 2021, he was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. He is participating in “Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home,” New Orleans´ 2024-2025 triennal curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. As the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Isasi will be working on “The weight of a gaze (is to listen to the sound of a kilogram),” a project that will culminate in a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum
It's like talking to a wall
2020
An idea is just the shape of a flower
2022
Recording
More Upcoming Lectures
Apr 15 at 5:30pm • Museum Lobby
Being and Becoming in Contemporary Chinese Art
This talk by Peggy Wang, associate professor of art history and Asian studies at Bowdoin College, addresses the conflicting pressures that artists in China confronted during the 1990s and early 2000s, including rapid urbanization and cultural globalization. Even as they navigated political constraints and deficits in resources, contemporary artists enacted productive strategies for making and exhibiting their art. This lecture foregrounds artists’ assertions of being and becoming, both as critical tactics for configuring identity and generative topics unto themselves. Wang will particularly examine how artists studied the vibrant dynamics of change through temporal, historical, and material dimensions in their art.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China, on view at the Kemper Art Museum from February 27 to July 27, 2026.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series